Elementary School Teachers’ Internet-specific Epistemic Beliefs, Source Evaluation Self-efficacy, Information Commitments, and Online Information Searching Behaviors

• Main Authors: Hung-Yuan Wang, 王鴻原
• Other Authors: Chin-Chung Tsai
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/57487538972718027926

博士 === 國立臺灣科技大學 === 應用科技研究所 === 104 === Recently, the Internet has become the main source when teachers searching information for teaching. This study investigated Taiwanese elementary school teachers’ Internet-specific epistemic beliefs (ISEB), source evaluation self-efficacy (SESE), information commitments (ICs), and their searching behaviors when they searching online information for instruction. The current study contained two parts. In the first part, quantitative data were collected from 479 elementary school teachers by utilizing three self-reported instruments: Internet-specific epistemic beliefs questionnaire (ISEQ), source evaluation self-efficacy survey (SESES), and information commitments survey (ICS). The results found that the teachers tended to believe that the Internet contains certain and detailed specific information, and they also held the beliefs about the online information should be justified. Moreover, the interplay among the three construct were explored. The results of SEM competing models revealed that the teachers’ SESE played as a partial mediator on their interrelations between the ISEB and ICs. In the following path analysis, the teachers who tended to believe that the Internet contains accurate knowledge preferred to adopt information from authoritative and social networking websites. Except content of the information, the technical factors were also crucial issues for the teachers when they considered the usefulness of online information. The teachers’ justification of knowing played an important role on their SESE and ICs. Moreover, the higher SESE the teachers had, the more advance ICs they possessed. The second part of the study invited 20 representative participants based on their score of the SESES. Two groups (high SESE group and low SESE group) contains 10 participants respectively. The participants were required to conduct a practical searching task. They made an instructional slide for 10-minutes short talk about the topic of genetically modified food by searching the information on the Internet. The searching processes were video-recorded and transcribed into behaviors codes. The results of lag sequential analysis and interview revealed that High SESE teachers possessed experienced searching skills, and tended to compare the accuracy of information from different websites. On the contrary, the Low SESE teachers mainly surfed the websites suggested by search engine, and even without question the credibility of online information. Their instructional slides mainly came from their copying and pasting from the Internet. Meanwhile, the teachers with mature ISEB tended to search instructional information from multiple sources, while the teachers with less mature ISEB also preferred to adopt “copy and paste” strategy to make their instructional slides.