26th International Conference on Educational Sciences (ICES-UEBK), Antalya, Türkiye, 20 - 23 Nisan 2017, ss.129-131, (Özet Bildiri)
Purpose: One of the main objectives of the education programs
is to equip students with 21st century skills. In order to educate individuals who
search and question, critical thinking, problem solving, and literacy
definitions have been made for different fields. Literacy requires
understanding and interpreting a content in a different way. In
order to solve the problem, different ways are sought to reach the desired
situation. Examining a
content in different ways requires problem solving and access to different
sources of information. It is of utmost importance to find the
most reliable and accurate information among these sources in order to solve
the problem or to interpret it. Although educational policies often refer to
the use of information and communication technologies by students and the use
of information and communication technologies in the presentation of their
contents, the importance of applications that can be used by information search
skills in different learning activities is not much emphasized. Some researchers believe that the
integration of subject area and information search activities will help
learners to learn concepts, improve the skills of information literacy, have
up-to-date information in science and mathematics. When studies on information seeking are examined, it is seen that students
have difficulty in understanding the task of searching for information,
planning the search process, using appropriate search strategies, and getting
to know the information.
Since computer systems are used extensively in education,
experts note that information search activities need to be considered in order
for effective learning to take place. Argumentation, seen as an important
component of science literacy, is of great importance in terms of access to
knowledge and the effective use of knowledge. It is thought that online information seeking at this point is also
important in terms of the argumentation activities that help acquire scientific
literacy skills. Argumentation helps learners to learn scientific content,
develop high-level reasoning, critical thinking and decision-making skills, and
how scientific knowledge is structured and evaluated. Information
seeking aims at accessing information by using the cognitive and metacognitive
skills of students. In the light of the given information, it can be stated
that the argumentation, media literacy and information search are
complementary. Although education policies often refer
to the use of information and communication technologies by students and the
use of information and communication technologies in the presentation of their
content, the importance of applications in which they can use information seeking
skills in different learning activities is not much emphasized. However, researchers said that the integration of the
subject area and information seeking activities; Students will learn concepts
and improve the skills of information evaluation.For this reason,
learning environments for information search strategies should be prepared in
such a way that students can access the current, accurate, informative sources
on the web, analyze and synthesize the information they have acquired and
create new information. However, teachers who
will provide this training are not well informed on how to use the web in
information search, plan the activities involved in the information search
process, evaluate the information obtained, and determine the knowledge search
skills of the students. For this reason, the examination of the information
search strategies used by the preservice teachers in the formation of the
arguments is important in terms of describing the current situation,
eliminating deficiencies, producing solution proposals, and having effective
online information search strategies of future generations. The aim of this
study is to identify the information search strategies that the preservice
teachers use when constructing the argument.
Method: The study was conducted with 35 preservice teachers using mixed research
method.
"Online Information Search
Strategy Inventory" developed by Tsai (2009) and adapted to Turkish by
Ashkar and Mazman (2013) was used as data collection tool in the study.
Inventory consists of 3 main
factors and 7 sub factors. Besides, the screen and argument records of the
students were also utilized. Data were analyzed by related samples t-test
and content analysis.
Results and Conclusions: The data from the inventory showed
that the argument activities helped preservice teachers improve their metacognitive
information search strategies. Screen and argument records make it clear that
the argument activities helped preservice teachers improve their procedural and
metacognitive information search strategies. It was understood that the
preservice teachers were able to produce solutions to the problems they
encountered, think how they would benefit from the information they seek, and
try to choose the appropriate information from websites. It has been seen that
the preservice teachers think about how they compile the information they have
obtained and examine the relation between the information they have reached. In
this sense, it can be stated that the argumentation process contributes to the
development of the information search strategies of the preservice teachers.