Web-based learning to enhance writing over the Internet

The purpose of this investigation was to build a Web site on the Internet that consisted of writing lessons and activities to determine the effects of Web-based teaming as an educational delivery technique on a systematic selected sample of students who submit their writings to kidspub.org for posting over the World Wide Web (WWW). Web-based learning is one of the areas of educational technology that offers great promise in using the resources of the Internet to enhance student achievement in a computer lab environment or through a network that allows student access to the World Wide Web. As a result of this technological innovation, students around the world will find that learning over the Internet will empower them toward self-determination while motivating them to become lifelong learners. KidsPub is a writing depository for students around the world to submit their material for posting over the Internet. The concept of KidsPub is to encourage students to write in order to become better writers. The students who were selected for this investigation were given a pretest and then treated with a six-week Web-based learning session over the Internet. The learning sessions allowed them to use a writing composition study unit to learn from, reading and writing exercises to take, and e-mail back to the researcher, and assignments to complete, and e-mail back as well. Once the six-week learning session was complete, students were given a post test to measure the effect of the project. Before the treatment of the KidsPub student got underway, a group of at-risk student from the Multicultural Educational Enrichment (MEE) program allowed the researcher initial testing of the web site in a computer lab environment to examine qualitative indices about the sites functionality and workability. When the sample of KidsPub students was complete, an investigation around three Null Hypotheses was generated from three categorical profiles of the sample population. Those categories were gender, age and foreign versus domestic students. The results of this study reveled that there were no significant differences in the three Null Hypotheses generated by the sample of the KidsPub population located over the Internet. While the quantitative results of this study were less than promising, the qualitative results provided useful information about Web site design and student interactivity relative to Web-based learning techniques. This information will prove invaluable to any educator who would like to duplicate this study