Designing Classroom Practices for Teaching Online Inquiry: Experiences from the Field

Abstract

Increasingly, students turn to the internet to seek information to address a problem or complete a learning task. These forms of online inquiry require students to locate relevant and credible information from multiple online resources and build a coherent representation of the explored issue (Leu et al., 2019). Although online inquiry is a common practice, students' competencies are often under-developed (Brand-Gruwel & van Strien, 2018), resulting in uncritical engagement with online information. Furthermore, many teachers find it challenging to embed instruction of these competencies into their curriculum (Derakhshan & Singh, 2011).To address these issues, we developed a learning unit designed to intentionally translate relevant theories and design principles into effective classroom practices for teaching online inquiry. Five language arts teachers from Finland collaborated with us to provide initial feedback on the unit; after revisions, they agreed to implement the lessons in nine upper secondary classrooms and reflect on their teaching experiences. In this paper, we describe the theoretical and pedagogical underpinnings of our unit's design and how it was implemented in classrooms. Then, we share teachers' reflections about the unit, including ideas for improvements. Theoretical UnderpinningsTwo theoretical models guided our work in defining core competencies students need to engage in productive online inquiry: the New Literacies of Online Research and Comprehension (Leu et al., 2019) and the Documents Model (Rouet, 2006).According to the New Literacies perspective of Online Research and Comprehension, successful completion of an online inquiry task involves using the internet to search for and evaluate information, synthesize important ideas from multiple online texts, and, finally, communicate the results of the inquiry to others (Leu et al., 2019). Skilled online readers are able to regulate these cognitively demanding comprehension processes across iterative cycles of online inquiry processes (Cho et al., 2017).Students do not necessarily engage spontaneously in these processes, or if they do, their processing is often shallow (Quintana et al., 2005). In addition, students tend to overestimate their online inquiry skills (Aesaert et al., 2017). Therefore, students need to be intentionally guided through online inquiry processes with models, scaffolds, and feedback that support their ability to engage in cycles of deeper thinking (Quintana et al.,

Research on the Evaluation of Deeply Intelligent Classroom Teaching and Learning in Colleges and Universities Based on Data Analysis

“…To better promote teaching and learning, the current research status of smart classrooms should be analyzed, smart classrooms and smart evaluations should be defined, and the function of smart classrooms in the context of big data should be analyzed. Kiili, C. and other researchers introduced the three principles of designing an online inquiry course and the feedback system of learning evaluation under the three principles and found that through in-depth interviews, the improvement of online courses by online course designers benefits in-depth interviews, it was found that the online course designers' online course improvement benefited from the teachers' teaching evaluation feedback, and the communication and cooperation between the two could help to promote the development of online course teaching [13]. Liu, B. and other researchers explored the multimedia classroom based on the e-learning platform and the innovation of the English language teaching mode, pointing out that the integration of multimedia teaching resources is the trend, and that multimedia can optimize the structure of teaching and improve the teaching function, which can help the students harvest knowledge based on their own experience [14].…”

“…Fenglan Liang, Weiwei Shen and Le Chen. Applied Mathematics and Nonlinear Sciences, 9(1) (2024)[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] …”

The Practice of SPSS-based Correlation Analysis in English Teaching Research: An Exploration of the Relationship between Classroom Teaching and Student Achievement

“…It is an institutional guarantee for the construction of students' development of key competencies in classroom teaching. Literature [14] describes three principles for designing online inquiry courses and additional insights into areas from which students benefit. It is shown that collaboration between researchers and teachers can be a fruitful endeavor that helps advance the design of productive online inquiry activities.…”