This document summarizes a student's inquiry project where they had students research the steps of the scientific method online. The student provided 8 pre-selected websites for students to visit in pairs. They analyzed what they found distracting, reading difficulty, likes/dislikes, and whether they'd recommend each site. Most students preferred sites that clearly listed steps with easy vocabulary. The student was surprised students disliked interactive elements but enjoyed evaluating the sites and collaborating with peers. The project helped students develop literacy skills through guided internet research.

1. Inquiry Project: Finding and Using Internet Information Jamie A. Klausing CEP 806 Professor Wong September 23, 2007 What steps do scientists use to help them solve problems?

2. Ideas, Predictions, and Explanations By uncovering what knowledge and experiences the student comes to us with, we can begin to provide learning activities that allow students to work toward becoming literate citizens. According to Bertram Bruce, in his article, “Digital Content: The Babel of Cyberspace,” we need to incorporate the opportunities and challenges of new technologies into our discourse about teaching and learning. Students need to be able to have participation, engagement, skills, availability, and accessibility if we are to meet these learner’s needs as literate citizen’s. www.readingonline.org/electronic/JAAL/Apri l_Column.html Students come to our classrooms with diverse learning experiences. It is important for us to find out what experiences students have had, what understandings or misunderstandings they have about a topic, and then tailor our instruction to build on those experiences and understandings and to provide them with new learning opportunities.

3. Ideas, Predictions, and Explanations What is a literate citizen? What skills do they need to function in today’s world? According to Bertram Bruce, “Literacy means control over discourses that use and communicate complex forms of knowledge…that is embedded in our daily practices.” (Bertram Bruce, “Twenty-First Century Literacy.”) The Encyclopedia Americana refers to literacy as the ability to read and write. Because each student is a citizen within our classrooms and will eventually become a citizen within his/her broader community, state, and world, it is important that students not only be able to read and write, but also are able to find information, read the information, write about what they find, and then communicate and collaborate with others.

5. Ideas, Predictions, and Explanations Within my classroom, I believed most students would have had some prior experience using the Internet. I thought some students probably had very limited experience, where as, others a great deal more. I was unsure as to how much research they had actually done using the Internet and wasn’t quite sure they understood how to use different search engines and search directories. I wasn’t comfortable, however, letting students do an open ended search especially, not knowing for sure what advertisements and inappropriate content might emerge as they began researching. I decided to focus on more of a guided inquiry. Students had been brainstorming steps that scientists use to help them solve problems. They generated a list of steps and presented them in class. I decided to have students use the Internet to find out what steps other people in our world thought scientists used to help them solve problems and compare them to the list they had generated.

37. Interesting Patterns in Data http://school.discoveryeducation.com/sciencefaircentral/scifairstudio/handbook/scientificmethod.html Students would also recommend this site to someone else.

38. Emergent Ideas, Questions, Lessons In providing the 8 sites to students, it was interesting to see what sites they chose to go to and why they selected those sites. Most students just randomly clicked on a site and recorded information about that site while they were there. Others looked through the sites to see which sites had the steps visible so that it was easier to complete the worksheet for each site they visited. Most students liked the sites that had the steps listed clearly when they arrived to the site. It made the task of finding the information easier for them. The sites that had vocabulary that was easy to read and understand were also sites the students liked.

39. Emergent Ideas, Questions, Lessons I was very surprised to find that many of the students did not like the interactive components of a few of the sites. Some felt they were distracting and took too long to find the information. They preferred sites where the information was clearly visible. Many students did not care for the advertisements on some of the sites. They felt they didn’t need to be there when they were just trying to get information. I was very surprised how focused and on task all of the students were. Each pair of students took turns and worked together to visit the sites, discuss the steps they felt were important to list, and took turns completing the worksheets.

40. Emergent Ideas, Questions, Lessons I was very curious to see if the students who used the word document on the computer would copy and paste information from the site. We had talked about borrowing information prior to going to the computer lab, however, I wanted to see if some students would still just take the text instead of putting it into their own words. I was pleasantly surprised to see only one or two groups did and the others did not. Only small portions of texts were taken, not entire selections.

41. Emergent Ideas, Questions, Lessons Allowing the students to work in pairs, provided an opportunity among them for dialogue, analysis of the site and a partnership in in the task. Even though students were working, they enjoyed the opportunity to work with others, to work at the computer, and to find and discuss the information. They also liked evaluating the site. It would have been interesting to see if the task wasn’t specifically asking for steps of the scientific method, if students would have evaluated the sites differently. Possibly they would have enjoyed the interactive components more for some of the sites if they would not have been focused on finding information.

42. Emergent Ideas, Questions, Lessons Bertram Bruce, in all of his articles, provided some helpful guidelines and strategies for using the Internet effectively. It was important that I took the time to think about what I wanted students to do, researched the sites that I wanted students to visit, and prepared a lesson in which students were able to work together to find information, read and write about the information and then discuss it and collaborate. It was also important that the task was done within the context of what we were studying. Students could then use the information they collected to see what steps other people within our world thought were important in helping them solve problems in science and comparing those steps to the list they generated before researching. Hopefully, through activities like these, we can help students develop skills that allow them to become literate citizens.