Abstract
Can high school students become contributors as well as users on the World Wide Web? This research explores a new Web-based curriculum idea, that of having students write and publish critical “reviews” of scientific resources. Writing reviews can be a means of both practicing critical evaluation of Web resources, and of making an authentic value-added contribution to the Web. This paper presents content analyses of 41 source documents and 63 critical reviews published by 11th grade students in a project-based science class. The source documents are described as to their publishing source, use of organizational elements, and use of graphics. Two aspects of student-written critical evaluation are analyzed: evaluation of organization and evaluation of graphics. While evaluations of graphics were somewhat thin in these reviews, this was due mostly to the lack of good content representations in the source documents. The on-line review form did successfully prompt students to make conceptual connections between organizational structure and their own sense-making process. Reviews also sometimes showed students engaged in perspective-taking related to potential readers. The literature review of this paper examines critical evaluation models and current social filtering models for large, distributed databases. A section on future directions for Web reviews describes a review-publishing system developed for the University of Michigan Digital Library system.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
REFERENCES
Alloway, G., Bos, N., Hamel, K., Hammerman, T., Klann, E., Krajcik, J. S., Lyons, D., Madden, T., Margerum-Leys, J., Reed, J., Scala, N., Soloway, E., Verkiri, I., and Wallace, R. (1996). Creating an inquiry-learning environment using the World Wide Web. In Edelson, D., and Domeshek, E. (Eds.), Proceedings of the First International Conference on the Learning Sciences. Association for the advancement of computing in education, Charlottesville, Virginia.
Armbruster, B., and Anderson, T. H. (1981). Content Area Textbooks. Reading Education Report No. 23, Washington, DC: National Institute of Education, ERIC ED 203298.s.
Baumann, J. F. (1984). Effect of restructured textbook passages on middle grade students' comprehension of main ideas: making the inconsiderate considerate (Doctoral Dissertation, Indiana University, 1984), Dissertation abstract, ERIC ED 255865.
Blumenfeld, P. C., Soloway, E., Marx, R.W., Krajcik, J. S., Guzdial, M., and Palincsar, A. (1991). Motivating project-based learning: Sustaining the doing, supporting the learning. Educational Psychologist 26: 369–398.
Bos, N. D. (2000). High school students' critical evaluation of scientific resources on the World Wide Web. Journal of Science Education and Technology 9: 161–173.
Bos, N.D., Krajcik, J. S., and Soloway, E. (1997). Student publishing in a digital library: goals and instructional supports. In Bell, P. (Symposium chair) Artifact-building in computer learning environments: supporting students' scientific inquiry. Paper presented at the Annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL, March 24–28 1997, ERIC ED 408580.
Bos, N.D. (1998). Affordances of students using theWorldWideWeb as a publishing medium in project-based science learning environments, Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, [on-line] http://www-personal.si.umich. edu/~serp/work/
Brown, R., and Pressley, M. (1994). Self-regulated reading and getting meaning from text: the transactional strategies instruction model and its ongoing validation. In Schunk, D., and Zimmerman, B. (Eds.), Self-Regulation of Learning and Performance: Issues and Educational Applications, Lawrence Eralbaum, Hillsdale, New Jersey.
Callison, D. (1993). Expanding the evaluation role in the critical thinking curriculum. In Goodin, M. E., and McNallly, M. J. (Eds.), School Library Media Annual 11, Libraries Unlimited, Inc, Englewood, California.
Hill, W., Stead, L., Rosenstein, M., and Furnas, G. (1995). Recommending and evaluating choices in a virtual community of use. Proceedings of CHI 95 Human factors in computing systems, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), New York.
Ibsen, D. J. (1995). Collaborative information networks. In Schnase, J. L., and Cunnius, E. L. (Eds.), Proceedings of the First International Conference on Computer Support for Collaborative Learning, Lawrence Erlbaum, assoc, Mahwah, New Jersey. [On-line] http://www-csc195.indiana.edu/csc195
Kozma, R. (1991). Learning with media. Review of Educational Research 61: 179–211.
Lustick,D. (1996).The Elements of cyberspace: student researchers untangle the Web of chemistry resources. Science Teacher 63: 32–35.
Paivio, A. (1986). Mental Representations: A Dual Coding Approach, Oxford University Press, New York.
Pressley, M., and Afflerbach, P. (1995).Verbal Protocols of Reading. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, New Jersey.
Resnick, P., and Varian, H. R. (1997). Recommender systems. Communications of ACM 40: 56–75.
Roscheisen, T., Winograd, T., and Paepcke, A. (1995, August). Content ratings and other third-party value-added information: Defining an enabling platform, D-Lib magazine http:// www.dlib.org
Rubin, D. (1984). Social cognition and written communication. Written Communication 1: 211–245.
Selman, R. L., and Byrne, D. F. (1974). Astructural-developmental analysis of levels of role taking in middle childhood. Child Development 45: 803–806.
Shah, P., and Carpenter, P. A. (1995). Conceptual limitations in comprehending line graphs. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 124: 43–61.
Terveen, L., Hill, W., Amento, B., McDonald, D., and Crete, J. (1997). PHOAKS: A system for sharing recommendations. Communications of the ACM 40(3).
Wallace, R., Bos, N., Hoffman, J., Eccleston Hunter, C., Krajcik, J., Soloway, E., Kiskis, D., Klann, E., Peters, G., Richardson, D., and Ronen, O. (1998). ARTEMIS: Learner-Centered Design of an Information Seeking Environment for K-12 Education. To be printed in the Conference Proceeding of CHI98, Human Factors in Computing Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, New York.
Wallace, R., and Kupperman, J. (1997). Online search in the science classroom. In Soloway, E. (symposium chair), Using Online Digital Resources to Support Sustained Inquiry Learning in K–12 Science Classrooms. Symposium presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL, March, 1997, [on-line] http://mydl.soe.umich.edu/papers
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Bos, N. Giving Back to the Web: Social Filtering of World Wide Web Resources in High School Science. Journal of Science Education and Technology 10, 3–15 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016612409186
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016612409186