The purpose of the study is to investigate how sixth graders benefit from an intervention that targeted at online inquiry skills in science. The Internet has become important source of information for young learners in school contexts (Mason, 2018). Students are expected to search for information and find relevant sources from the Internet, and to use multiple sources for writing synthesis for learning purposes. These kind of online inquiry skills are very important future skills and emphasized in Finnish and other European primary school curricula. However, students seem to have difficulties in online inquiry skills (Perez et al., 2018; Hautala et al., 2018), even though they can access information from various sources with a simple click. Hence, searching for information in the internet with search engines like google can be perceived easy to use, however, studies have found that children have difficulties finding relevant information that is in accordance with their search goals (Bilal & Gwizdka, 2018).   

Online inquiry is a complex set of skills. First, learners must define the information problem and set the search goal. The search goal may lead to several queries and search terms. These search terms with the support of a search engine offer several lists of possible relevant results for the student. Once the list of search result links is returned, learners must click, read and evaluate the relevance of these results in light of their significance for their search goals. Then, they must compare information from different sources, compile the data and write a synthesis based on those sources (Gerjets et al., 2011; Kiili et al., 2018). This process requires different kind of skills, e.g. searching skills, evaluation skills and reading skills (e.g. Kuiper et al. 2009). Furthermore, the skill to write a synthesis based on multiple sources is very important subskill in online inquiry.

Having such skills described above play a central role in students’ school and work lives in the current knowledge society. However, these skills are not systematically taught in schools. Furthermore, the research community has thus far neglected the development of authentic assessment methods for Internet inquiry skills beyond fixed-choice knowledge tests (Sormunen et al., 2017). This intervention study used a performance-based test within an authentic Internet inquiry environment, and the students were taught to search for relevant science information and write a synthesis in an authentic classroom situation. The following research questions were developed: How do students benefit from systematic intervention targeted in online inquiry? What kind of differences were found between the control and intervention group in searching for information and in writing synthesis?

The participants were 248 sixth graders from 10 primary schools in urban areas of Finland. In total, 127 girls and 118 boys aged 12 to 13 years participated in the study (M = 12.14, SD = .41). This study is a part of larger research project (IFuCo SA 294163) and has a quasi-experimental, pretest–posttest design. The teachers were trained and received teaching and learning materials (e.g. lesson plans and worksheets).They conducted the intervention with their own classes. The intervention started with a general hands-on introduction to online inquiry (nine lessons). An eight-hour science module allowed students to practice online inquiry on the topic of energy. For example, the students were asked to answer how a plant, a human being and a car obtain energy. The students were asked to document their search processes, evaluate the quality of the search terms and the reliability of the retrieved webpages, and to write a synthesis based on multiple sources. A performance-oriented Internet application called NEURONE (Sormunen et al., 2017) was used in the pre- and posttests. Every student had access to a computer. Two science tasks, related to forests and the water cycle, were used in the pre- and posttests in a counterbalanced way. The students were asked to search for three relevant sources in NEURONE and write a synthesis. NEURONE recorded a huge amount of process data. During the search phase, it recorded the time spent on each task, and the number of queries and clicked webpages. Furthermore, it also recorded the bookmarked sources and written syntheses. The quality of the syntheses was scored based on understanding the task, the use of concepts and coherence (i.e. logical connections between sentences). All three dimensions were scored from 0 to 4 (0 = not understandable, 1 = minimal; 2 = satisfactory; 3 = good; 4 = very good) for a total of 12 maximum points. Descriptive statistics, repeated measures ANOVA and non-parametric statistical tests (i.e. Wilcoxon signed rank tests for two related samples) were conducted to analyse the search process indicators and the quality of the syntheses.

Our results indicate that this intervention increased students’ online inquiry skills in science, especially in synthesis writing, an ANOVA on the quality of synthesis revealed a statistically significant effect from pre-to posttests between the intervention and control groups in that the intervention group outperformed the control group in synthesis writing (F [1, 246] = 7.34, p = .007, ηp2 = .029). Both the intervention and the control group developed their searching skills and were more successful in finding the relevant sources in less time in the posttest. Whereas the intervention group had no differences in clicking pages and amount of queries the control group clicked statistically significantly more pages by less queries in the posttest. This could be explained in various ways. Search engines have been developed to understand the needs of the users, so they offer various possibilities for a successful search. Searching for information in the Internet could be seen as an everyday skill, already with the age of 12, so the students seem easily adapt their skills into various environments. However, the level of difficulty to find the relevant sources may play a role and has to be taking into consideration in the further development of the Neurone. In sum, searching for and identifying relevant sources seems to be a different skill than writing a synthesis based on multiple sources. But both skills are very important part of the online inquiry. Hence, these skills must be systematically taught as complimentary skills. Both students and teachers require support in developing these skills in everyday classrooms. In particular, primary school students require safe and scalable learning environments like NEURONE where to practice online inquiry.

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