Web-based Internet Search Scaffolding Tool (WISST) was designed to facilitate 7^th graders’ Internet search process by emphasizing certain metacognitive skills improvement in the light of a framework proposed by Quintana, Zhang, and Krajcik (2005). This framework suggests that through an online inquiry, children experience certain cognitive phases starting with asking questions, and then searching, evaluating, reading, and synthesizing come. Authors suggest that those steps can be scaffolded by certain approaches on which WISST focused. WISST includes ‘start’, ‘search’, ‘reading’, and ‘end’ modules. Although they were designed as separate modules, they work in a meshed manner depending on the input of the user. The user has freedom to move from one process to another. A small metacognitive training video providing tips for effective web search is presented to users at first login to the system and it is accessible whenever needed via ‘help’ button. The aim of this module is to make users become aware of certain cognitive and metacognitive processes, obstacles, and challenges during an Internet search task. In this video, each step of a sample search is exemplified with the problem points and coping strategies.

The aim of this paper is two-folded. The first one is the detection of usability problems of WISST through heuristics. Since this is an iterative design, the first design is not and should not be the last design.  Instead, the first design is a kind of high-fidelity prototype with basic functioning modules in this design process. It is aimed to go further in design for fully functioning product by finding out and fixing the inappropriate parts of WISST. The second aim of this paper is to check for the appropriateness of implementation of the framework. In this framework, there are certain offerings for effective scaffolding that are applicable for both human and software scaffolding. The tool was designed on basis of these scaffolding strategies, thus it is necessary to see if these were really implemented as it was suggested by the authors.

Before the actual use, to eliminate the errors and to adjust the functioning of the tool, an iterative design approach was used throughout the design and development of the WISST. Iterative design begins with design, testing and measuring, and continues with redesign, retest and remeasuring. These steps continue in a loop and stop when the satisfactory results are gathered (Shackel, 1991). The iterative design continued until the usability evaluations results indicate satisfactory findings and this paper describes the heuristic evaluation step.

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