Fostering Reflective Thinking About Information In 5th Graders With Blogs: How Helpful Are Learning Supports?

This study is about fostering media and information literacy and, more precisely, reflective thinking about information in 5th graders. A learning scenario integrating weblogs into a class by providing learning tasks, learning supports and learning resources was elaborated and tested. The class was divided into a test group and a control group, which did not receive learning supports. Over five weeks the pupils ́ degree of reflection was measured by analysing their blog entries by means of pre- defined evaluation criteria. We also observed them while blogging and recorded our impressions. The results showed that, against our expectation, the pupils of the test group were less reflexive in their entries than the ones of the control group. However, we observed that the test group pupils verbally expressed many reflections, which they did not write down. This suggests that our learning scenario comprised of learning tasks, resources and supports promoted reflective thinking about information of all the pupils even if this is not recognisable in their entries.