Kickstarting Inquiry with WebQuests and Web Inquiry Projects. (Advancing Technology)

PICTURE A CLASSROOM in which students are grouped around computers discussing a series of World War II propaganda posters. In another part of the room, students are poring over a downloaded list of popular 1940s films and clumping them into categories. Is this what inquiry looks like, or is it just a more expensive form of collaborative group work? Social studies classrooms, probably more than those of other subject areas, have, an opportunity to use resources found on the World Wide Web to engage students at higher levels of thinking. Such activities enhance skills, such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, which support inquiry-oriented learning. Why should social studies educators promote inquiry oriented learning? The answer to this question might depend on how one defines “inquiry” According to the Exploratorium Institute for Inquiry, which promotes and supports science education reform nationwide, “Inquiry is an approach to learning that involves a process of exploring the natural or material world that leads to asking questions and making discoveries in the search for new understandings.” (1) Thus, the core of inquiry has four pans: exploring the world, asking questions, making discoveries, and coming to new understandings. At San Diego State University, the WebQuest and Web Inquiry Project concepts have been developed to assist teachers in their efforts to leverage the use of online resources to engage learners at various levels of inquiry. The WebQuest The scale of information explosion on the World Wide Web is truly mind boggling. While search engines such as Google enable instant access to more than three billion pages, the web is much larger than that. Bergman conducted a study of what he calls the “deep web,” which includes pages and documents generated on the fly by database software. Bergman estimates that the deep web contains more than five hundred billion documents. (2) This flood of information allows social studies educators and students to explore a variety of previously unattainable documents, including primary source materials, uninterpreted quantitative data, and the artifacts of a host of ideologies. (3) Through these explorations, students can aim to answer questions and solve real-world problems that are relevant both to the social studies and to students’ interests. Many educators agree that a social studies classroom in which learners actively pursue answers to their own topic-related questions is more effective than are traditional classroom environments. How then does one kickstart the habit of teaching with inquiry for the next generation of web-enabled teachers? In 1995, Bernie Dodge with Tom March developed the WebQuest model to help learners focus on using online information rather than looking for it. By the earliest definition a WebQuest is “an inquiry-oriented activity in which most of the information learners work with comes from the web.” (4) WebQuests are developed by teachers and are used by students to structure the process of the inquiry-oriented activity defined by the teacher. Students follow the five components included in a WebQuest: 1. Introduction: Prepares and hooks the students. Often motivational tools are presented to students, such as real-life scenarios. 2. Task: Describes what the end result of the activities will be. The task could be a problem or mystery to be solved, a position to be formulated and defended, a persuasive message or a journalistic account to be crafted, a creative work, or anything that requires learners to transform the information they have gathered into a new form. 3. Process: Lays out the steps learners should follow in order to complete the task. The online resources identified by the WebQuest developer are usually provided to students in the process. This section might also provide guidance on how to organize the information gathered from the list of websites.