Model
Digital Document
Publisher
Florida Atlantic University
Description
The purpose of this study was to analyze the biology content, instructional strategies, and assessment methods of 100 biological science websites that were appropriate for Grade 12 educational purposes. For the analysis of each website, an instrument, developed from the National Science Education Standards (NSES) for Grade 12 Life Science coupled with criteria derived from the Web-based Inquiry (WBI) for Learning Science instrument (Bodzin, 2005) and other pertinent published educational literature, was utilized. The analysis focused on elucidating the appropriateness of the biology content, instructional strategies, and assessment tools of selected websites for facilitating the biological science education of Grade 12 students. Frequencies of agreement and disagreement of the content of each selected website with criteria included in the data collection instrument were used for alignment determination of the content of each website with the NSES. Chi-square tests were performed by Microsoft Excel to determine the statistical significance of differences of actual and expected 85% frequencies of alignment of the analyzed website parameters with indicators of alignment to NSES. Chi-square tests indicated that at a 0.05 level of significance there was an overall difference between the actual and expected 85% frequencies of alignment of biology content, instructional strategies and assessment methods with website indicators of alignment with the NSES (p < 0.05). Chi-square tests also indicated that there was a significant difference between the actual and expected frequencies of alignment of analyzed categories (biology content, instructional strategies, and assessment methods) of the sampled websites with website indicators of alignment with the NSES (p < 0.05).
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