Web Page Design: Developing Cognition

This study explored the cognitive and metacognitive strategies that high school students used to design and develop pages for the World Wide Web. The research was conducted in a natural classroom setting by the teacher-researcher who used participant observation, a prior knowledge survey, student journals,interviews, and student presentations to replicate data from different sources. Data analysis was based on a hypotheses-generating model. The findings of this study strongly suggest that students used the cognitive strategies of searching, Web referencing, synthesizing, and evaluating. Students used the metacognitive strategies of planning and problem solving. The findings also suggest that the strategies that these students used were influenced by the following factors: prior knowledge, authentic audience, collaboration, and learning styles. Based on these finding three hypotheses were generated: Web page design builds cognitive thinking skills; Web page design requires that students reflect on their own learning as it builds metacognitive awareness; Web page design improves students’ ability to think about global perspectives.