How long should a webquest take

Character Education Lesson Plans. Search form Search. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. Why WebQuests? The WebQuest Formula WebQuests, say the teachers who use them, promote high-level thinking, develop problem-solving skills, and provide an avenue for seamlessly integrating technology into the curriculum. According to Dodge, the six building blocks of a WebQuest are: The Introduction orients students and captures their interest.

The Task describes the activity's end product. The Process explains strategies students should use to complete the task. The Resources are the Web sites students will use to complete the task. The Evaluation measures the results of the activity. The Conclusion sums up the activity and encourages students to reflect on its process and results. Where Do I Begin?

The Design Process Once you have your outline or template in hand, here are some main points to include: The Topic. You may have already decided on a topic related to current events or to an area of the curriculum that's inadequately covered in available texts. If you're still searching for a topic, however, Tom March, who developed the first WebQuests with Bernie Dodge, suggests starting "where you're at. You can also explore March's Idea Machine, which provides 50 prompts designed to help begin the brainstorming process.

The Task. If you can't find it here, you can't find it anywhere! The Process. In this section, you'll include the roles students will assume and the steps they'll follow to complete the activity. March's Designing for Success provides not only a Designer's Checklist, but also some clickable "friendly advice" for the creatively challenged! The Resources. Identify the online resources available on your topic by brainstorming a list of related words and using the list to search for relevant sites.

As you search, create a hotlist of current, accurate, and age-appropriate sites that will engage your students' interest. The Evaluation. As Kenton Letkeman points out, "Traditional evaluation techniques are not the best means for evaluating the results of WebQuests, since all students may not learn the same content.

Individual evaluation rubrics should be developed that follow curriculum objectives and are easy for students to understand. Share It! Trending Report Card Comments It's report card time and you face the prospect of writing constructive, insightful, and original comments on a couple dozen report cards or more.

Here are positive report card comments for you to use and adapt! Struggling Students? You've reached the end of another grading period, and what could be more daunting than the task of composing insightful, original, and unique comments about every child in your class?

The following positive statements will help you tailor your comments to specific children and highlight their strengths. You can also use our statements to indicate a need for improvement. Turn the words around a bit, and you will transform each into a goal for a child to work toward. Sam cooperates consistently with others becomes Sam needs to cooperate more consistently with others, and Sally uses vivid language in writing may instead read With practice, Sally will learn to use vivid language in her writing.

Make Jan seeks new challenges into a request for parental support by changing it to read Please encourage Jan to seek new challenges. Whether you are tweaking statements from this page or creating original ones, check out our Report Card Thesaurus [see bottom of the page] that contains a list of appropriate adjectives and adverbs.

There you will find the right words to keep your comments fresh and accurate. We have organized our report card comments by category. Read the entire list or click one of the category links below to jump to that list. Behavior The student: cooperates consistently with the teacher and other students.

Character The student: shows respect for teachers and peers. Group Work The student: offers constructive suggestions to peers to enhance their work. Interests and Talents The student: has a well-developed sense of humor.

Participation The student: listens attentively to the responses of others. The introduction should also motivate the students to want to learn more and explore the topic in depth. The next section of the WebQuest is the task. Therefore, the task students complete should go beyond read-the-page-answer-the-questions activities. Dodge suggested that the thinking skills required in a quality WebQuest include comparing, classifying, inducing, deducing, analyzing errors, constructing support, making abstractions, and analyzing perspectives.

The task also often identifies roles for cooperative group members. Each student is assigned a role to play as the group completes the assigned activity. Next, the resource section provides links to high-quality Internet-based resources that students will use to complete the activity.

Some WebQuests have a separate section for information sources, where some embed their resources in the WebQuest as anchors pointing to information on the Internet Dodge, What is most important for this section is that the resources are high quality and developmentally appropriate for the targeted age group.

The process section provides a step-by-step guide for completion of the activity. The WebQuest should provide a clear description of exactly what students should do to complete the task. Again, the resources may or may not be embedded here as anchors to Internet sites. Most quality WebQuests include an evaluation tool or assessment instrument as the next to last section.

The evaluation may be in the form of a rubric or checklist. Because the task involves some type of inquiry learning, paper-pencil types of assessment will not work. The evaluation tool should illustrate to students exactly what they should do to be successful. The last section of the WebQuest is the conclusion. The conclusion brings closure to the activity and summarizes what the teacher hopes the students have learned as a result of completing the activity.

The conclusion may also encourage students to extend their recently gained knowledge to other domains Dodge, Taken together, these sections should form a WebQuest that is reflective, fluid, and dynamic Watson, Students are motivated to engage in inquiry learning and are provided all the resources and guidance to do so. Students are aware of what they need to do to be successful. In addition, they are encouraged to use their newly acquired knowledge in different contexts.

Tom March, who is credited as being a major contributor to the development and refinement of WebQuests in the early stages, suggested that WebQuests promote student motivation and authenticity, develop thinking skills, and encourage cooperative learning March, According to March, WebQuests increase student motivation by providing an essential question, real-life resources with which to work, and opportunities to work in cooperative groups.

WebQuests, by their very nature, encourage the development of thinking skills. In addition, WebQuests encourage cooperative learning among students.

Because WebQuest tasks are often complex or involve controversial topics, students work in groups to complete tasks March, A handful of individuals have conducted research studies on the use of WebQuests. Lipscomb implemented WebQuests in his middle school social studies class. After receiving an orientation to WebQuests, which included a discussion of the key elements, resources available, and strategies for using time effectively, the class completed a WebQuest on the Civil War.

The students were engaged in the learning process throughout the activity. As a result of his experiences, Lipscomb made the following suggestions for implementing WebQuests:. His findings suggested that students had difficulty appreciating the value of online sources, as they preferred to use print resources to gather information.

The student initially organized their data in simple schemes, but the teacher was able to lead the students to more meaningful organization. Weinstein suggested that in order to foster critical thinking skills in students teachers must embed critical thinking in school subjects. Teaching critical thinking skills should not be viewed by teachers as an additional subject.

Rather, it should be incorporated into the existing curriculum. Vidoni and Maddux compared the WebQuest format with the framework for critical thinking established by Weinstein and the Institute for Critical Thinking. They found that the WebQuest format meets the six key elements in critical thinking suggested in the framework. A search of several databases resulted in few empirical studies that look at the educational benefits of using WebQuests with school-aged students.

Several articles investigated the link between using WebQuests and fostering critical thinking. All of these articles support the notion that WebQuests are excellent tools for fostering critical thinking skills, but what about content? The focus on high-stakes testing requires teachers to be more than a little concerned about the content students learn. Teachers may feel that WebQuests are useful for developing critical thinking skills, but they may choose not to implement them if they feel that the students are not learning the appropriate content.

The search of databases resulted in no studies that examined the link between WebQuests and teaching content. This study explores whether or not using WebQuests is appropriate for enhancing a unit on the Texas Revolution. Specifically, this study attempted to answer the following questions:. To answer these questions, end-of-unit exam scores for students who completed a WebQuest activity designed to enhance the instruction of a unit on the Texas Revolution were compared to scores on the same exam for students who completed traditional instructional activities.

A total of 86 seventh-grade students participated in the study. The control group, which completed traditional instructional activities, consisted of 38 students, 18 males and 20 females. The experimental group, which completed the WebQuest activity , consisted of 48 students, 24 males and 24 females.

At the beginning of the school year, school administrators randomly assigned students to one of the four class periods. All classes were homogenous in terms of academic ability.

The study was conducted in a school system in metropolitan Dallas, Texas. The school district and all schools in the district are rated by the state of Texas as exemplary. The study was conducted in a school in a wealthy area, and it serves students from high socioeconomic backgrounds.

State standardized tests place this school and district as one of the best performing in the state of Texas. The end-of-the-unit- exam used to collect the data was created by the adopted textbook for the course. Each item on the test was weighted equally 3. Teachers are strongly encouraged to use the textbook-created tests when evaluating content because of the objective nature of the standardized tests.

Administrators want students to be familiar with the format of objective tests before they take the state mandated tests. The end-of-the-unit test may not be the most appropriate form of assessment for the performance-type activities, but administrative mandates require teachers to use them. Because of time limits and the mandate to use objective tests, rarely do teachers in this district use other formal forms of assessment. If teachers cannot see the benefits of WebQuests reflected in the objective tests, they are less likely to use the technology.

Teachers are increasingly being held accountable for how students perform on standardized tests and are more inclined to teach and assess in ways that are consistent with the objective nature of these tests. For these reasons, the authors choose to use the textbook created test to gather data.

In addition to the objective tests, the experimental group was evaluated on their newscast presentations using a rubric. The control group was evaluated on their poster activities, also using a rubric. Because the rubrics were very different from each other, it was difficult to compare the data. However, teacher perceptions of how each group performed are included in the data.

This study is limited in that it looks only at the content learned by both groups and not the skills. WebQuest developers and researchers have touted the innovation as one that fosters critical thinking. This study purposely chose the unit on the Texas Revolution based on the enormous amount of content included in the unit.

The state-mandated tests seem to favor content over skills on this topic and teachers may be hesitant to use WebQuests if they are ineffective for teaching content. A second limitation of this study is that it only looks at one unit of study, one that is admittedly difficult for students. Prior to beginning the unit, students were tested to elicit prior knowledge of the Texas Revolution.

The mean score for the experimental group on the pretest was An independent samples t -test was used to determine if there was a difference in the prior knowledge of the experimental group and the control group. The average scores indicated that the students knew very little about the Texas Revolution prior to the unit. The classroom teacher began the unit on the Texas revolution with both groups at the beginning of the second semester of the course. Both groups were involved in traditional type learning activities, such as teacher lecturing, reading the textbook, studying vocabulary, reading historical fiction related to the Texas revolution, watching videos, completing worksheets, and participating in classroom discussions during the two weeks of the unit.

Because the unit contained vast amounts of information, such as names, dates, and battles, the teacher opted to include hands-on learning activities for both groups that would allow the students to further construct their own knowledge of the material.

This makes it hard to identify a typically effective Web Quest. Nonetheless, we have found that Web Quests that promote learning typically have 6 common attributes. The introduction is a means of providing the students with background information that is intended to be a springboard for them to begin the process of inquiry. Formulating challenging questions is the difficult part of developing an effective Web Quest. In most cases, a single question is posed that requires students to analyze a vast array of information.

For example, "Compare the leadership styles of George Washington and George Bush," or "You just made a revolutionary invention, what steps would you take to insure that no one can steal your ideas for profit? In this section, the teacher leads the student through the task. The teacher offers advice on how to manage time, collect data, and provides strategies for working in group situations. Teachers sometimes label this section: learning objectives or advice. In some cases the section is replaced with a complete time line for the project.

Students are provided with tools usually web sites , or leads to tools that can help them complete the task. In order for this to be valuable, a teacher must thoroughly review each source.

When deciding on sources consider the following:. Only list sites that support the proper view for which you are aiming. Make sure all the sites you choose are appropriate and do not link to any inappropriate sites.

Make sure the source is credible. Anybody can create a web page. Try to use a commercial. These sites have something to lose by providing you with poor content. An effective assessment tool to evaluate a product of a Web Quest is a rubric.

Rubrics help make the teacher's expectations clear for students. Ideally, rubrics can be created collaboratively with students' input. Effective Web Quests have a built in mechanism for student reflections.