Research coordinated by UTA team

UTA 1: An interview study on information and media practices, and online inquiry orientation (2015-2016)

Students at the upper secondary level are interviewed to explore their every-day information and media practices, and how they approach inquiry tasks at school. The interviews will address students’ daily and weekly information and media habits, their general conception of information seeking as a process and common experiences while interacting with information and media sources in their daily life. They will also be asked about their epistemic beliefs, conceptions and experiences of inquiry learning and explorative searching at school, and how they relate information searching in everyday life and at school. Based on the results the EIM survey of every-day information and media practices will be developed. Based on the survey we will categorize students according to their information and media practices. The categories will be based, for example, on activity level, broadness in use of information sources, depth of information seeking, habitual sources, and ways to interact with information in their daily life. The findings regarding students’ ways to approach inquiry will be a base for the OIS survey (online inquiry survey) which will include measures of epistemic beliefs and a measure of the disposition to understand for oneself, an ability to relate ideas, critically use evidence with organized effort. The results will inform the development of the instructional model for teaching online inquiry (ARONI1 sub-study), and give criteria to select a validated test for epistemic beliefs for the JYU2 sub-study.

photo.jpgUTA 2: A replica study of pedagogical practices in Guided Inquiry classes in the USA (2016-2017)

The sub-study will focus on the pedagogical practices in high schools using the Guided Inquiry framework to teach online inquiry competences in the USA. Data is collected in cooperation with Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey using the English version of the CKP questionnaire and following the PPF in data collection and analysis (HU team). The replica design of the study with HU2 sub-study aims to increase variation in the pedagogical practices analysed, and especially to investigate if a research-based framework dedicated to teaching online inquiry competences makes a difference in pedagogical practices. The study is a natural follow-up from a previous study by the team’s case study in an upper secondary school applying professional innovations in OICs instruction, and the findings support the development of the instructional model.