Design considerations for the Library of Congress Learning Page: providing learners context and access to the collections - World Wide Web site - Children and the Digital Library

Library Trends, Spring, 1997 by Judith K. Graves

The education community has been undergoing a transition to a more learner-centered approach in which the learner assumes an active role in the classroom by conducting research, working cooperatively in small groups, seeking the solutions to problem-based scenarios, and developing and presenting results, not only to the teacher but to classmates and to others via multimedia presentations, e-mail, and the World Wide Web. Teachers are developing lessons that take students beyond the declarative and conceptual knowledge domains into the critical thinking skills of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis of information. To help students achieve these skills, teachers are incorporating primary source materials into their lessons. Such materials provide relevancy and realism, adding context t topics being studied. They provide an intrinsic motivation and curiosity that can spur the budding researcher on to greater depths of discovery in the learning process (Center for Children and Technology, 1996a). Students in project-based curricula are researching and including primary sources in their projects. To aid in the development of critical thinking skills, a Web page should be transparent in its ease of use, avoiding greater cognitive load on learnings as they seek to locate materials for their research (Park & Hannafin, 1996, p.68).

Margaret Honey, associate director of the Center for Children and Technology, in a white paper (Honey & Hawkins, 1996) prepared for the Department of Education, discuss the educator and the challenge digital libraries face in designing a Web site that supports the educator of today. She advocates descriptive, rather than prespective, support for teachers developing activities that promote higher-order thinking skills. Her organizations has worked closely with the Library of Congress to develop descriptive guides to the online collections (Center for Children and Technology, 1996a). Portions of these guides are available on the Learning Page.

Tasks and Skills Needed

Students are novices in the research process and in using complex database such as American Memory. Neuman (1995) argues that Instructional Systems Design principles have much to offer when designing an informational database "to encourage students to think about, process, and apply information in meaningful ways" (p.26). In her study of high school students using online and CD-ROM databases, she concludes that "students' status as novice learners and novice researchers should be the basic determinant of the design of both the conceptual and the navigational components of databases and database systems used in schools" (p.43). She describes her findings using a framework by Malcolm Fleming (1981, p.26)0000000, whose work in instructional design has been elaborated upon by other researchers and synthesized from empirical principles to produce design guidelines for instructional hypermedia (Park & Hannafin, 1993). Neuman's recommendations are echoed in these guidelines and confirm the validity of an ISD approach for the conceptualization of the Learning Page.