EvalWEB Instructional Design
Needs Assessment
The world wide web is the soapbox of our generation. Armed with some basic knowledge of the web, anyone can produce and publish a web page, making it available to millions of people all over the world. Intended initially as a way for researchers to disseminate information easily, the web contains a wealth of useful information. There are things available on the web which are not available in print, because the audience for them would not justify publication costs. The web can also provide information which is much more current, because a web page can be updated instantly, while even the fastest print publications (newspapers) can only update the readers once a day.
With this freedom of information, there are also problems. Since anyone can write a web page, and anyone can say anything to everyone with a few lines of HTML code, there are many things online of dubious informational or educational value. More dangerous than web pages which do not apply to what students are learning (of which there are many) are web pages which appear to contain useful information but actually don't. There are no filters applied to the web like there are in traditional print media. There are no editors to control what is published. A sixth grader can just as easily write a description of sheep cloning experiments as the researchers doing the actual experiments. It is up to the reader to determine which source contains the more reliable information. Students who are using the web for research, then, must have the skills to discriminate between reliable and unreliable information found on the world wide web.
In many cases, students know more about the internet than their teachers. When a student pulls up a list of 200 web sites relating to his or her topic of research, the teacher is likely to be more impressed than the student. In this situation, it is unlikely that the teacher will teach the student how to interpret the information found online. Because the teacher is used to researching in the realm of print publication, the need for interpretation of content found online may not always be clear. The student (and possibly, the teacher) is frequently unaware of the fact that the existence of a web page does not guarantee its reliability. Students often misinterpret opinion, satire, and information provided by unreliable sources as indisputable truth, simply because it is published on the web.
Students must acquire the skills necessary to determine if a given web site contains reliable information. In a world where the amount of information available on the world wide web is increasing at an alarming rate, the student who does not use this resource will be left behind. If the student does not have the skills necessary to filter the information obtained from the web, he or she will likely jump to invalid conclusions.
It is clear that, in this case, instruction is the most appropriate solution to the problem. Students must have the intellectual skills to accurately evaluate a web page. The intellectual skill involves the combination of several rules involving the page's domain, author, content, date of revision, and links.
Students could be provided with a list of things to look for in a reliable site, such as the site's location, the author's name, and the date of publication. Without the skills needed to actually find this information, however, the list would do little good. Additionally, students must have the resources necessary to solve this problem. If they are finding information online, they must have access to the world wide web, and they must be reasonably proficient at finding things online.
Incentives don't appear to be a factor for this project. Students usually like to have information that is valid when they do research. If they are researching for a class, their teachers will expect the information in their reports to be accurate. The intrinsic motivation combined with the motivation to do well in their classes is likely enough. The real problem here is the lack of necessary skills for assessing the reliability of online information. This project will use instruction to bridge the gap between the student who can use the web, but cannot assess the reliability of the information found there, and the ideal student who can place web pages in their appropriate context, and draw reasonable conclusions about the information presented from other clues available.
The goal for this instruction is to enable students to determine the suitability of the information presented in a given world wide web page for school research based on the site's address, the content of the page, information available about the author and his or her frame of reference, the date of publication, and links associated with that page. Students will determine whether a given site is suitable, questionable, or unsuitable for research use based on established criteria.
Return to the EvalWEB Instructional Design.
The finished project is located at http://www.hudson.edu/hms/comp/evalweb.