Learning to design webquests: an exploration in preservice social studies education.

Annotation provided by Chris Webber:

Bates, Alisa. Learning to design webquests: an exploration in preservice social studies education. Journal Social Studies Resource, 34(Spring), 2008.

This article explores the effectiveness of the use of technology in the social studies area for students who are doing their teacher training. It is grounded in an examination of the effectiveness and authenticity of WebQuests as a method of instruction. In so doing it also discusses how deep the ideas are in the assigned webQuests as well as how the audience receives this sort of instruction. Ultimately the article reports on the following findings: “technology needs more support to become the background of a content-centered task; (2) additional scaffolding is needed to help teacher candidates understand how to assess the quality of work that future students may construct while utilizing WebQuests; (3) students need more support to develop deep, conceptually rich social studies content in their projects” (10).

“In the context of social studies, a WebQuest provides a format for supporting students in working with the wide range of materials available on the Internet such as the materials available on the American Memory website through the Library of Congress. However, the literature on WebQuests has done little to demonstrate the power of WebQuests beyond advocating their use and providing anecdotal tales of students' experiences” (12).

“One can hope that the opportunity to be the learner who is actively engaged with technology as a natural part of teacher education courses will help to foster the kind of teaching necessary to create technologically and inquiry rich approaches to social studies instruction” (20).