This Targeted Research project is working to develop, refine, and test technical and pedagogical interventions to support students' Self Regulated Learning (SRL) learning processes in digital library settings, including the use of tools built into the library as well as pedagogical scaffolds that educators implement. Students must possess self-regulatory knowledge and skills, including selecting, incorporating, and evaluating resources, to take full advantage of the powerful affordances of digital libraries. Indeed, well-developed, individual knowledge and skill in student SRL are key to the efficacy of digital libraries in promoting learning. Moreover, there is good empirical evidence that SRL ability can be taught and that doing so leads to improved conceptual understanding. Based on these core propositions, this project is synthesizing knowledge from the fields of educational psychology, education, and SRL research to teach SRL specifically aimed at an NSDL Pathways collection and an analogous humanities-focused portal. The project team is identifying the key SRL processes associated with learning, followed by developing interventions that foster these processes to help educators and students realize the potential of two digital libraries. The two content domains selected are computational science ("CSERD") and history ("DocSouth"). The analysis is beginning with developing SRL mechanisms for the NSDL CSERD Pathway in both classroom and laboratory settings. This is being done at the level of skill expected of successful high school and college students. The findings from this stage are then being used to test the efficacy of these SRL tools in student use of DocSouth library (history projects). This project is investigating how and why students learn with digital libraries rather than simply whether they show gains from pre-test to post-test.
Today’s students must learn to find, navigate, synthesize, and critique a nearly overwhelming array of online information sources and ideas. Even within curated, reliable sources, such as NSF’s National STEM Digital Libraries, students must still learn to effectively identify what they need to learn, how they should best learn it, and how they can test whether their efforts have led to deep conceptual understanding that is long-lasting. Through the work of our award, we were able to identify the ways in which students used digital libraries to learn. Rather than assuming that "one-size fits all," we studied how students learned about both science and history topics, and what aspects of their learning were similar and different across these tasks. In our work we utilized advanced data collection and analysis techniques that, while much more time-intensive than commonly used measures like surveys, resulted in accurate and rich data regarding how students actually thought about science and history content, and their own growing understanding. These unique, rich data required us to develop new ways of analyzing student learning that we believe will become a model for future research in this area. These new data collection and analysis techniques revealed novel findings that would not have been possible otherwise. For example, we found that students who consciously monitored their own growing understanding, and the relevance of the content they were viewing, were more likely to successfully learn than those students that focused on other things. These findings, among other lessons learned from our work and our review of the scholarly and practice literatures, allowed us to develop theoretically- and empirically-support interventions to teach students how to successfully use online resources. We tested these interventions in a local high-school, and developed a stronger understanding of student needs regarding online learning, and how to help teachers address these needs. Our work has resulted in practical innovations that enable students to become critical consumers of online information, and help their teachers and parents to foster this knowledge and these skills in those students who might otherwise struggle to learn from the Internet. Likewise, we identified strategies that were beneficial for specific tasks, such as elaborating upon prior knowledge in science and corroborating across multiple information sources in history. Our findings have been disseminated in both the scholarly literature, to inform future work in this area, and to local educators and learners, who will use it to help students develop the digital literacy skills that they need to be effective 21st-century learners.
