ANNOTATION: Higher Order Thinking in an Online World: Toward a Theory of Web-Mediated Knowledge Synthesis
Deschryver, M. (2014). Higher order thinking in an online world: Toward a theory of web-mediated knowledge synthesis. Teachers College Record, 116(12), 1-44.
Access to the web is nearly ubiquitous at home, work, and school. Most people use the web for straightforward information-based tasks, but its capacity for inspiring higher-order thinking and learning is potentially transformational. (The author cites multiple resources on this assertion.) The problems humans face are increasingly complex and emerge at an increasingly rapid rate, and the web has not been fully exploited for its ability to inform decision-making and creative solutions to difficult problems. Emancipated from the need to memorize and store information, humans can now devote more of their intellectual power to engage instead in higher-order thinking, such as creativity, analysis, and integration of ideas (cited by the author, Anderson & Raine, 2010).
At the time of the writing of this paper, the author asserted that education rarely addresses these kinds of uses of the web, and pointed out that a new framework is called for to help frame approaches to understanding educative processes that the web can enable. “The ability to create new knowledge, to synthesize meaning that is neither explicit nor implicit [in web resources] will move students away from simple information consumption and toward more complex knowledge generation” (Deschryver, 2014, p. 4). In this paper, Deschryver proposes a literature-reinforced, multipronged theory to help researchers understand, describe, and evaluate how advanced students generate new ideas from web-based resources.
Deschryver bases his theory on a “purposeful sampling” empirical study whose theoretical framework draws from literature in a several domains of education: educational psychology, reading comprehension, hypertext and web-based reading, cognitive flexibility, and creativity. It defined higher-order thinking with the Bloom’s term “synthesis,” and further subcategorized the synthesis process as: synthesis for meaning (understanding and deducing), generative synthesis (insights and lightbulbs!), and creative generative synthesis (creating new products based on these insights and knowledge). The dual research goals were to test whether three forms of synthesis existed in a web-based environment and then describe them, and to capture any new forms of synthesis that hadn’t been accounted for in the prior literature review.
Eight doctoral and law students were chosen for a think-aloud project that involved 1) reading to learn, and 2) reading to do. They were given a finite amount of time to use the web to research, understand, and then propose a novel solution for a complex problem in a knowledge are of which they did not have extensive expertise. The subjects used a browser, practiced a think-aloud to detail their cognitive processes, and used their own online and offline process to store and organize their thoughts and the information. Additionally, screen recordings captured online behaviors, post-interviews gathered additional insights, and clickstreams and notes helped to further elucidate each person’s process. Data were coded and analyzed.
The resulting analysis revealed that effective web-mediated knowledge synthesis in this population relied on seven primary activities:
- Divergent keyword search phrases: Subjects used a variety of novel and/or unique search terms.
- Synthesis for meaning: subjects made extensive use of organizing, combining, composing, rearranging, rewriting, compiling and structuring text from various sources to derive meaning from multitudes.
- In the moment insights: Light bulbs lit from single or multiple resources, activity unconnected to the web, or a combination of these.
- Repurposing: Participants applied knowledge to understand different phenomena and other contexts.
- Reinforcement: Ideas were reinforced for students who encountered information in new contexts that they had already encountered in prior ones.
- Note-taking: Online and offline note-taking aided students’ comprehension and synthesis.
- Creative synthesis: Subjects demonstrated at least one example of an ability to combine disparate ideas, concepts or perspectives to generate new/innovative products or solutions.
The author indicated some limitations noted for further research. One is the think-aloud process yields only as much information as an individual is able to express and recognize about their own process. The theory is descriptive but not predictive, in that it borrowed from the field of creativity research to craft a more precise description of how individuals construct meaning and new ideas from multiple sources they read on the web. The work highlighted the importance of note-taking to higher-order thinking and learning via the web. Finally, it presents an understanding that takes into account the many factors and areas of knowledge that influence how individuals synthesize existing information to make new understanding.
An important contribution to this work is that its insights will be helpful to those who are engaged in moving education away from a focus on rote learning toward the twenty-first-century approach that emphasizes creative problem solving, adaptability, flexibility, and cognitive agility—a “new ecology of thinking,” because as Deschryver aptly states, in the web-mediated world, “Just because learners have more time to engage in higher order thinking does not mean they know how to do it.” This work is designed to provide a foundation.
Susan Gedutis Lindsay 