A Quest for HOTS: Webquest!

Introduction

Webquest is a ‘constructivist lesson format... wrapped around a doable interesting task’ (Dodge, 2009, from YT talk). It is an organized plan on any specific lesson, embedded with plenty of useful resources, that targets to develop learners’ higher order thinking skills (HOTS). It equally promotes learners’ capacity to take charge of their own actions independently. In other words, it helps develop learners’ autonomy.

Webquest is introduced by Bernie Dodge, the professor of San Diego University, USA in 1995. Basically, the majority of web tools used in language teaching and learning are interpreted from the theoretical underpinnings of behaviorism. Nevertheless, the web tools like quest garden or zunal that deal the lesson format based on the principle of webquest is underpinned by constructivism. The learners explore, analyze and evaluate their tasks and resources, construe the meanings of the tasks and finally come up with their own actions while being involved in webquest.  Regarding what webquest needs to consider, Polly and Ausband (2009, p. 29) mention, ‘Webquests should give students opportunities to solve problems and answer questions by connecting information, categorizing information, manipulating information and putting information together in new ways.’ They mean webquest needs to give plenty of resources for the learners to explore and it also needs to explain process in a proper way connecting to the given task.

In the research work of Polly and Ausband on ‘Developing HOTS through webquest’, which was carried out in a Title I intermediate School (Grade 5 and 6) in the United States, they found that of 18 tasks in 11webquests created by school teachers, 13 of 18 tasks (72.23 per cent) focused on lower-level knowledge overlooking the development of students’ HOTS. So it suggests that simply designing a lesson following the format of webquest may not make HOTS-oriented lessons. Again some kind of planning and thought is required to produce the tasks that best fit to HOTS-oriented lessons in webquest.

How to create webquest?

It’s easy to create through the web tools such as quest garden and zunal (there may be few other sites/tools) ; however, to create a well-planned webquest, little time and effort is required.

The following video delineates the process of creating a webquest from quest garden.

The webquest that I have created recently for a mini-saga lesson can be one of the samples you may be interested in. It can be found in this following link.

www.questgarden.com/q/minisaga. Your feedback is always appreciated.

Advantages:

1.    Webquest can be used to create well-planned and highly organized lesson detailing the step-by-step processes that can direct learners to the task.

2.    Plenty of resources can be connected to the task as it has a separate space to delineate the process.

3.    It develops learners’ higher order thinking skills since they are required to analyze, evaluate the given resources and eventually to solve the task on their own.

4.    It also curtails learners’ autonomy since there remains a plenty of resources which they can choose and use them as bases in solving the given task.

5.    The process in webquest functions as a collaborative scaffolding as it clearly directs to the expectations articulated in the tasks.

Disadvantages:

1.    It takes a long time for teacher to plan and organize the content of the lesson in webquest.

2.    The process needs to be orderly and specific. Sometimes, the nuanced and complex processes can mislead the learners.

3.    It may take a long time for a teacher to find resources related to the task. 
    

    Refrences

Dodge, B. (2009, July 31) What is a webquest? Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7UynehA_l0

Polly, D & Ausband, L. (2009) Developing higher order thinking skills. Journal of Computing in Teacher Education. 26(1) 29-34