Examination of Information Seeking Strategies Used by Preservice Teachers in Argumentation Focused Activities


Eryılmaz Toksoy S., Erenler S., Reisoğlu İ.

26th International Conference on Educational Sciences (ICES-UEBK), Antalya, Türkiye, 20 - 23 Nisan 2017, ss.129-131, (Özet Bildiri)

  • Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Özet Bildiri
  • Basıldığı Şehir: Antalya
  • Basıldığı Ülke: Türkiye
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.129-131
  • Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

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.