There are many big issues in today's society, such as climate change, biodiversity and energy supply, that require a good understanding of several subjects like physics, biology and other environmental sciences. The foundations for understanding complex phenomena are laid at school, starting at primary level.

In addition, digital development with the Internet has found its way into school life. The internet offers an immense wealth of information, views and reflections. Students are expected to learn how to find relevant information and thus how to cope with the large amount of information and present a result like a synthesis based on multiple sources (Magliano et. al. 2017). Therefore, it is important in science education to learn both scientific content, such as facts and concepts, and skills, such as online inquiry (Goldman et.al., 2012). Online inquiry involves skills such as understanding the inquiry task, searching for and evaluating information, finding and selecting the relevant main ideas and synthesising these ideas into a coherent model, and presenting this model in a written synthesis (Brand-Gruwel et al. 2009).

Students acquire simple online inquiry skills in their everyday lives. They are used to search for information in a fast and automatized way. However, online inquire at school for learning complex phenomena require active mental control which is a demanding process and takes time (Goldhammer et al., 2014). Furthermore, the complex process of online inquiry often consists of several iterative cycles and suggest self-efficacy to complete a task from the student. By self-efficacy we mean the confidence in his or her ability to organise and execute the course of action required (Bandura, 1979). Self-efficacy is adapted to online inquiry tasks (Putman, 2014) and it is considered as a significant predictor of student´s performance (Chang, 2014).

Therefore, this study addresses the following research questions:  

- What kind of online inquiry self-efficacy do students have?

- How does the student performance differ between the pre-test and the post-test??

- How does student performance relate to perceived online inquiry skills?

The study was conducted as an intervention with a pre- and a post-test. The participants were 258 fifth and sixth graders from primary schools in Southwestern Finland, with an average age of 11.3 years. In the first lesson, after a general introduction, the self-efficacy questionnaire and the online inquiry skill- test were administered. The intervention on a complex science topic and on online-inquiry-skills was conducted by the own teacher in five 90-minute lessons. The online inquiry self-efficacy scale targeting of synthesis writing consisted of 4 items with a Likert scale ( 1= strongly agree to 5 = strongly disagree), for example: I feel confident that I can make a summary of the main points of several Web pages. Cronbach´s Alpha α = .80 showed a good internal consistency for the scale. The learning environment KidNet was. It covers the whole online inquiry process and collects all student actions as log data. The learning environment is flexible and allows the student to move back and forth and the students can implement their own online inquiry cycles. The quality of the synthesis was assessed based on the main ideas integrated in the written synthesis (MAX = 9). The time to complete the task, and the time invested in writing the synthesis were calculated. The students perceived a high level of online inquiry self-efficacy. They felt confident in writing a synthesis, combining the main ideas from several sources (M=2.01; SD=.62). However, they wrote less than three main ideas out of 9 possible in the pre-test (M=2.65; SD=1.89) and a slightly more than three ideas in the post-test (M=3.11, SD=1.87). Based on a paired samples t-test it was a significant increase from pre-test to post-test with t (257) = -3.61, p < .001, d = 0.23. Based on t-tests the total time significantly decreased from pre-test (M = 2173.72, SD = 464.58) to post-test (M = 1825.03, SD = 488.95); t (257) = 10.41, p < .001, d = .65. The time spent in writing the synthesis increased from pre-test (M = 833.79, SD = 372.43) to post-test (M = 988.22, SD = 405.16); t (257) = -5.29, p < .001, d =- .33. A Pearson correlation test was calculated to examine the relationship between perceived self-efficacy and time factors and quality of the synthesis. No significant correlations were found.

Our findings indicate that students have a high level of confidence in writing synthesis in online inquiry task. In contrast to this high self-efficacy, the quality performance result for writing a synthesis based on multiple texts was rather poor, as they only included few relevant main ideas in the synthesis. Students invested significantly less time to complete the task in the post-test than in the pre-test, but they took significantly more time to write the synthesis in the post-test than in the pre-test. This result is interesting and can be interpreted as follows: On the one hand, the students learned how to use the Kidnet environment and automated some subtasks, making them faster in the post-test than in the pre-test. The total time was reduced by this automation. On the other hand, students have learnt that writing a synthesis based on main ideas from different sources is a complex process that should be controlled, flexible and slow and so needs time. Therefore, the students enlarged the time for writing a synthesis. Furthermore, there is no relationship between self-efficacy and factors like time and the quality of the synthesis. We assume that students’ self-efficacy is influenced by those simple everyday online tasks that are automated. This needs further investigations. As a result of the intervention, students have learned to use the learning environment faster, to invest more time to write a synthesis, and were more successful in writing a synthesis in the post-test than in the pre-test. Students´ confidence on writing a synthesis in online inquiry seems to be overestimated and unrealistic. Students need systematic teaching for online inquiry in order to be able to cope with future learning challenges.

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