Although students often appear to be skilled in retrieving and making use of information from the internet, research shows that their information problem solving skills are overestimated. They show deficiencies in many of the necessary skills, such as generation of search terms, selection of sources, and critical processing of information. It is therefore necessary to design and develop effective instruction to foster information problem solving skills. Research shows that learning from examples can be an effective approach for teaching complex cognitive skills in ill-structured domains, such as writing or communicating. To explore whether this also holds for information problem solving, this study investigates the effects of presenting a modelling example in an online information problem solving training. Results of two experiments show that viewing a modelling example, presented as a screencast of an expert thinking out loud and interspersed with cognitive prompts, leads to a higher posttest performance than performing a practice task. The effect persisted on a delayed posttest 1 week later.The results imply that information problem solving instruction in an online setting can benefit from employing video-based modelling examples.
KEYWORDSexample-based learning, information problem solving, modelling example, prompting 1 | INTRODUCTION 1.1 | Information problem solving Information problem solving (IPS) is a skill often required from students in today's educational programs, as it is common for teachers to provide assignments requiring students to search for information on the internet. These assignments can be characterized as information problems: problems that require more information to solve than is currently available to the learner. They pose an information gap, because students must first search for the missing information and then process it in order to solve problem. Teachers might assume that searching and processing information automatically leads to learning, but such information problems are often ill-defined and present unknown or unclear task demands, goals, or solution paths. Although it is tempting to regard students as "digital natives" and expect that they automatically acquired skills to solve such problems, research shows that most students' IPS skills are underdeveloped. Students struggle to systematically search for information, evaluate it critically, and produce an adequate solution for an information problem (Frerejean, van Strien, Kirschner, & Brand-Gruwel, 2016;Walraven, Brand-Gruwel, & Boshuizen, 2008).An effective approach to solving an information problem can be summarized in five steps (e.g., the IPS-I model; Brand-Gruwel, Wopereis, & Vermetten, 2005; Brand-Gruwel, Wopereis, & Walraven, 2009). First, learners build a problem representation by reviewing the ---This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is no...