Fostering information problem solving skills through completion problems and prompts

Even though students often manage to find their way around the internet in their search for information; information problem solving skills do not develop naturally. Previous research shows that adults and teenagers often encounter problems when solving information problems, indicating that formal training in this domain is needed. This study was an attempt to develop such training. A two-hour computer based instruction was presented to 118 first-year university students at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. The learning results of four different instructional approaches were compared: completion problems, emphasis manipulation, a combination of both, and conventional learning tasks. In addition, the study investigated which of these instructional approaches required the least amount of mental effort, as measured by subjective mental effort ratings. The results show that instruction was effective, but contrary to our expectations, no differences were found on the performance measures or the mental effort ratings between the conditions. This study therefore shows that integrated learner support is not always necessary, and conventional learning tasks can be sufficient to reach the desired learning effect.