Students' self-regulated learning, online information evaluative standards and online academic searching strategies

Abstract

Online information searching strategies (OISS) used by students can be viewed as a key indicator in online learning environments. Therefore, developments in their OISS may also involve variables such as self-regulated learning (SRL) and online information evaluative standards (OIES). Three instruments, an OISS, a SRL and an OIES were used to investigate the roles of SRL (including basic and advanced SRL) and OIES (including naive and advanced standards) in the OISS of 307 high school students in Taiwan. The results of a structural equation model confirmed that both students' SRL and OIES have positive predictions on their OISS. In addition, students' advanced OIES mediated the relationships between basic SRL and OISS. However, when the students took advantage of the advanced SRL in employing OISS, the significance of the OIES was not shown. This study contributes to the understanding of students' online academic information searching strategies. IntroductionSince the advent of web technology, there has been an explosion of teaching and learning via the Internet. Extending information and communication technology (ICT) skills has become one of the educational goals generally set by many secondary schools to better meet the needs of the digital age (Kuhlemeier & Hemker, 2007). More and more high school teachers are encouraged to use Internet resources and integrate Internet activities into their curricula. High school students are expected to learn computer skills for doing their schoolwork or completing assignments (Kuhlemeier & Hemker, 2007). It comes naturally for many teachers to assume that secondary students are acquainted with Internet skills, such as surfing the web or locating online information. However, not every high school student has developed sufficient Internet skills or critical ability needed for schools. In fact, a survey from 2003 to 2008 by Kimber and Wyatt-Smith (2010) have pointed out that high school students' capabilities in curricular-related online searching tasks are still insufficient, despite the prevalence of the new technology. As secondary students are frequent users of the Internet by now, an understanding of their thoughts about online resources is very important.While completing learning tasks, students are increasingly involved in searching for information on the Internet (Tsai, 2009a). There has been a growing amount of studies concerning information seeking or searching practice for learning (Hofer, 2004;Tsai, 2009b;Tsai, Hsu, & Tsai, 2011;Zhou & Xu, 2007). It is generally held that different searching strategies used by learners lead to different searching results, and thus different performance (Wu & Tsai, 2007). As searching and processing information is a complex cognitive process which requires learners to verify, evaluate, organize and integrate information from a variety of sources (Mason & Boldrin, 2008;Walraven, Brand-gruwel, & Boshuizen, 2008), it has become essential for researchers to study variables related to learners' online searching behaviours in web-based le...

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