METHODOLOGY
This chapter first presents a description of the participants, the instructor, and the WebQuest curriculum. The instruments used to collect data and the methods adopted to conduct the subsequent data analysis are described in the second and third section.
Participants The Teacher
Teacher Betty was an experienced senior high school teacher who had taught English for 25 years. She was the English teacher for the students in the present study, and the instructor for the WebQuest class.
The Students
The students were recruited from a senior high school in the Northern Taiwan.
There were 9 students, including 5 female students and 4 male students (Table 2).
Within each WebQuest activity cycle, they were divided into 3 groups, and switched members for the next new cycle. In this way, they had opportunity to interact and cooperate with different group members. Their English proficiency reached intermediate level: 7 out of 9 students passed the General English Proficiency Test (GEPT) intermediate level first test, i.e. reading test and listening test.
Table 2
Participants Profile
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Name Gender GEPT
(Intermediate)
Grouping (Cycle 1)
Grouping (Cycle 2)
Brad Male passed Group 3 Group 1
Bonnie Female failed Group 2 Group 2
Donna Female passed Group 3 Group 3
Flora Female passed Group 1 Group 1
Kelly Female passed Group 3 Group 2
Lily Female passed Group 1 Group 1
Leo Male failed Group 2 Group 2
Steven Male passed Group 2 Group 3
Victor Male passed Group 1 Group 3
Note: The present study uses pseudo names for each participant student.
The WebQuest The WebQuest Design
The WebQuest design in the present study followed Dodge’s (1997) framework, and included two cycles of long-term WebQuest. The two WebQuests were created by the researcher and reviewed by a university professor and an experienced senior high school English teacher. The use of long-term WebQuest allowed students to study a topic thoroughly and eventually generate their own knowledge. The topic of the first cycle was about heroes in the tales, and the second cycle was food culture around the world. There were sub-topics under each main topic. For example, students explored issues concerning food safety, dining etiquette, and food culture in the food culture WebQuest.
Each WebQuest was composed of three to four tasks, and students completed
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one task at one class meeting. Students read the teacher-prepared materials in the first task, two to three web links, and finished the reading comprehension task. The reading comprehension task asked students to answer questions, share what they had read with group members, or compare and contrast ideas discussed in different articles. They then organized their group’s discussion, and made a short presentation to the class. Second, students needed to search for more information online based on the task given. Each task was embedded with several guided questions, giving students a direction for searching. They had to synthesize their group findings and report to the class. At the end of each cycle, students applied what they had learned from the previous tasks to a new context. They had a new topic, for instance, the food best describes Taiwanese culture, and made a final presentation on their research topic.
Students had one week for preparation, and the other for oral presentation. Students’
presentations were evaluated by a rubric. They had peer evaluation as well as teacher evaluation. Students and teacher gave comments and scores based on the assessment items on the rubric. Finally, teacher wrapped up the session, and led students to reflect what they had learned from the tasks of this cycle in the Conclusion section.
The Interface and The Tool
The two WebQuests in the present study were built by the Zunal WebQuest Maker (zunal.com), as shown in Figure 1 and Figure 2. There was a main menu on the left column, listing the six components of a WebQuest. Participants can easily access to any of the component by clicking the corresponding bottom. Within each component page, the contents were clearly displayed, with needed hyperlinks attached.
Besides, each participant was given an iPad. The teacher prepared PC for students to prepare final presentation.
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Figure 1. Interface of the WebQuest (Cycle 1)
Figure 2. Interface of the WebQuest (Cycle 2)
Data Collection
This section first delineates the instruments as well as methods adopted for data collection, and discusses the procedure for data collection. The primary data came from class observation, student semi-structured interview, and students’ reflection journals.
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Instruments
Class observation.
Class observation enables the researcher to experience the WebQuest activity in practice as the participants do, and to identify the relevant behaviors or environmental conditions (Yin, 2003), in this case, contributing to their development of reading and critical thinking ability. The researcher took field notes on the ongoing group discussions and the important events happened in the class. Audio recording devices were set up to keep track of the students’ group discussions during the WebQuest activity.
Students’ reflection journal.
Students were required to write an online reflection journal after each task.
Students wrote about how they had completed the task, what they had done in the group discussion, and what they had learned from the task. The journals were important self-stated documents, providing the researcher “other specific details to corroborate information from other sources” (Yin, 2003 p.85).
Interview.
The interview was conducted in a semi-structured form at the end of each WebQuest cycle. The researcher chose semi-structured interview “because it offers sufficient flexibility to approach different respondents differently while still covering the same areas of data collection” (Noor, 2008 p.1604). The guide questions were generated from class observation and students’ reflection journals, but left room for the interviewees to elaborate their opinions. To relieve students’ tension, the researcher held a group interview with 3 students in a group, the same group as they
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had in class, at the first cycle, and held an individual interview at the second cycle.
Date Collection Procedure
During the two cycles of WebQuest activity, the researcher did the class observations on each class and took field notes, which provide “fruitful sources of analytic insights and clues (Marshall & Rossman, 2006, p.99)” for the subsequent interviews. After each class observation, the researcher wrote a reflective journal, which helped the researcher record the “patterns appearing in the data collected”
(Sheton, 2004 p.68), and became one of the question sources for follow-up semi-structured interview. Students’ in-class discussions were audio-recorded and fully transcribed into written texts for the following analysis. Their reflection journals were collected by Google Doc.
Based on these sets of data, the researcher prepared the questions for the semi-structured interview. The interviews were conducted in Chinese to allow the interviewees to clearly express themselves. Through the in-depth interview, the researcher were able to probe into the students’ subjective experiences (Peräkylä &
Ruusuvuori, 2011), and their WebQuest learning experiences. The researcher was able to triangulate her own interpretations of the data, and to confirm the validity (McMillian & Schumacher, 2001).
Data Analysis
The analysis basically followed the qualitative analytic procedure suggested by Marshall and Rossman (2006, p.156): organizing the data, being immersed in the data, generating categories and themes, offering interpretations through analytic memos, searching for alternative understandings, and writing the report for presenting the study. The procedure was not a sequential process. The process of data interpretation
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was an ongoing, emerging process (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011) that invited the researcher to continually revisit the data.
The researcher started the data analysis on the interviews and reflection journals, with an attempt to identify themes signaling students’ development of reading ability and critical thinking ability. Next, the coded themes and patterns were triangulated with the verbatim of students’ in-class discussion. The verbatim of in-class discussion provided detailed evidences for students’ developmental process of reading and critical thinking ability, and made the themes more specific in context. At last, the researcher re-read the whole set of coded data again, trying to determine the factors affecting students’ development of these two abilities, and offered interpretations. To ensure the validity of the present study, the researcher did a prolonged field work, and collected data from various sources. The translation excerpts were first done by the researcher herself, and reviewed by two of her graduate school classmates in the NTNU. Then the translated data were sent to the participant students for confirmation.
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