Marc Stadtler
[Person] [Project]
Marc Stadtler, Dr.
Short Vita
- 1974:
- Born in Germany.
- 1995-2001:
- Study of Psychology at the University of Münster (Germany).
- Since Feb 2002:
- PhD student of the VGK.
Contact
Phone: ++49 (0) 251 / 83-31372
FAX: ++49 (0) 251 / 83-39105
email: Marc.Stadtler@vgk.de
WWW: My homepageWestfälische Wilhelms-Universität
Psychologisches Institut III
Fliednerstr. 21
D-48149 Münster (Germany)
Ph.D. Project
Topic: The role of metacognition in laypersons searching the web for medical informationSupervisor: Prof. Dr. R. Bromme (Münster)
Start of the Ph.D. project: 02/2002
Summary
Today, laypersons often retrieve health-related information from the Internet. Consider for example a patient who had got a certain diagnosis from her doctor. Often she will be eager to learn more about this specific disease or about different treatment alternatives. If she has at least a little command of Internet browsers and search engines, she will retrieve a plethora of health-related documents within a few seconds. However, elements such as the structure and the varying quality of scientific information on the Internet impose considerable constraints on laypersons' Internet research. Drawing on research on (multiple) text comprehension (e.g., Perfetti, Rouet & Britt, 1999) and learning with hypermedia (e.g., Hofer, 2004), I argue that the Internet could be an enabling technology for laypersons' learning and understanding of science related matters, when and only when laypersons dispose of metacognitive knowledge and strategies necessary to integrate heterogeneous information of varying quality and veracity from multiple sources.
In my dissertational project, I investigated the role of metacognition in laypersons' Internet research in two steps. In a first explorative study using think-aloud methodology, I found that laypersons at the showed rather low levels of metacognitive activity when searching the web for medical information. Furthermore, laypersons used only few und often inadequate criteria to evaluate the veracity of information. However, metacognitive activity was significantly correlated to knowledge acquisition and the soundness of written assessments of the websites' credibility.
Based on the aforementioned results, the metacognitive computer tool met.a.ware was developed, to support laypersons' Internet research. Met.a.ware enables laypersons to store the information they have found on the WWW systematically. They do this by assigning information to different tabs labeled with ontological categories which underlie the topic cholesterol. They are also prompted to engage in metacognitive activities (monitoring and evaluating), each time they paste information into the system.
An experimental test of the tool underlined the role of metacognition in laypersons' Internet research (Stadtler & Bromme, 2005). Participants receiving evaluation prompts outperformed members of a control group (working with paper+pencil) in terms of knowledge about the sources of information. In addition, laypersons receiving monitoring prompts acquired significantly more knowledge about facts, and performed slightly better on a comprehension test. Furthermore, laypersons receiving evaluation prompts produced more arguments commenting on the credibility of the source of information in an essay task.In further experiments, we plan to measure the long-term effects of the tool on laypersons' ability to judge scientific information on the WWW. Furthermore, we consider to adapt met.a.ware to the needs of children and to implement the tool in science education at the secondary level.
References:
Hofer, B. K. (2004). Epistemological understanding as a metacognitive process: Thinking aloud during online searching. Educational Psychologist, 39(1), 43-55.
Perfetti, C. A., Rouet, J.-F., & Britt, M. A. (1999). Toward a theory of documents representation. In H. v. Oostendorp & S. R. Goldman (Eds.), The Construction of Mental Representations During Reading (pp. 99-122). Mahwah , NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Stadtler, M., & Bromme, R. (2005). Dealing with multiple documents on the WWW: The role of metacognition in the formation of documents models. Proceedings of the 24th Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
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Last update: 23 Nov 2006, vgk-webmaster@vgk.de