Becoming a critical websearcher

ing is closely related to metacognitive skills like planning (what am I going todo), monitoring (is the process going according to plan?) and evaluating (what have Ilearned that I can use a next time?), thus high road transfer can be fostered bystimulating a persons’ metacognitive skills. Instructional design based on this transfertheory should pay particular attention to strategy explication, emphasizing abstractionand de-contextualization. This means for the skills of evaluation results, information andsource that students should know the steps to be taken, strategies that can be used inthe problem solving process, and how to regulate this process.To foster transfer Simons et al. (2000) emphasize the importance of a good,extensive and well organised knowledge base and the domain specific interpretationof the skills. This knowledge base includes three representations of the information:conceptual, episodic, and action representations. Conceptual representations refer toconcepts and principles with their defining characteristics (like a cat is an animal withwhiskers and a tail). Episodic representations refer to personal experiences withinstances of concepts and principles (like I loved the cat I had when I was a child).Action representations refer to the things one can do with the conceptual and episodicinformation, i.e., using that knowledge to solve a problem (like cats can be kept as apet). When the three representations have many and strong relationships with eachother (e.g., conceptual representations have a relation with concrete experiences) andwith representations in other domains, the knowledge base has a high degree ofconnectedness. These connected, rich representations will make learning outcomesdurable, flexible and generalizable. Knowledge and skills of students ‘are not restrictedto one context but reach out to other contexts and situations.’ (p. 2).For evaluation skills this would mean that students should have deep knowledge ofconcepts associated with the key concept evaluation. The instruction based on thistheory should stimulate students to construct a well structured representation of thecriteria to evaluate search results, information and source that can be used in differentsituations and while solving different tasks. Moreover, students must become aware ofthe usefulness of the criteria and they should experience that the use of the criteriahelps to become critical websearchers. This experience makes the representationbetter anchored. Evaluation of search results, information and source on the Internet Imagine a 9th grade student, Sam. Sam has to write an essay on the life of philosopherFrancis Bacon (1516-1626). Sam types the query ‘Francis Bacon’ in a search engine andviews the hit list. There are several criteria Sam could use to evaluate the hit list: title andsummary of the site, the kind, the address, the rank in the hit list, whether the sitementioned in the hit list is known to the user and the language (see Appendix). In this