Scaffolding learning tasks to achieve internet literacy

Situated within the socio-constructivist perspective of teaching and learning, this study draws on theories of multimodality, mediated discourse, new media design and digital culture to investigate the strategies that learners use to create multimodal responses to academic problems in science. The study examined how learners select resources from the Internet using design experiment methodology and a repeated measure design. Over one semester, teaching strategies and learning activities for one high school science class were redesigned into five academic problem-solving tasks that included topics such as Internet literacy, scaffolding for selecting web-based resources, and constructing multimodal projects. Quantitative parametric analysis was used to identify changes in the students Internet literacy.