תרומתם של מארגנים גרפיים למיזוג מקורות מידע מרובים

Nowadays, it is easy for students to find diverse information sources on many questions and topics. Hence, students need digital literacy skills that will enable them to create significant new knowledge from multiple information sources. Studying with multiple information sources involves complex thinking processes and considerable cognitive load. Therefore, there is a need for scaffolds that will support and promote students’ abilities to meaningfully integrate information from multiple information sources. This study examined how students use graphic organizers to represent multiple information sources and the effect of a visual scaffold on their representations. 34 10th grade students read six information sources about a controversial historical event. Half of the participants created graphic organizers without guidance, and the other half created graphic organizers using scaffold that included visual symbols of sources, arguments, reasons, and their connections. Initial findings revealed that all students used multiple information sources to represent the historical event and employed diverse types of representations. Most of the participants in the scaffold group represented the sources of the information in their graphic organizers in contrast to a minority of the students who did not receive the scaffold. Additionally, participants who received the scaffold represented more source-content and source-source links compared to students who did not receive the scaffold. In conclusion, the initial results strengthen previous findings regarding the difficulties students experience in coherently representing and integrating multiple information sources. However, the scaffold seemed to enable more elaborate and well-integrated representations.