| With the increase of student access to the Internet in schools, teachers are more commonly designing open-ended online information-seeking tasks in which students find online information to understand a topic. However, many young learners do not succeed when seeking online information and, instead, retrieve and learn biased or inaccurate information. This study examined 56 sixth-grade science students' information-seeking effectiveness in relation to their epistemic metacognition and prior knowledge about a topic. Quantitative and qualitative methods for collecting and analyzing data were used within the Development of Epistemic Dimensions Framework (Feucht & Bendixen, 2008) to explore students' domain specific epistemic metacognition development in each of the four epistemic dimensions (certainty of knowledge, simplicity of knowledge, source of knowledge, and justification for knowing). The quantitative results showed that there was a significant relationship between information-seeking effectiveness and epistemic metacognition within the dimension of justification of knowing. Qualitative findings further revealed that all participants showed evidence of epistemic metacognition in each of the three developmental levels (absolutism, multiplism, and evaluativism) each with a higher concentration of evidence at the absolutism level.;This work is significant in that it explored sixth-grade students' epistemic metacognition within the context of online information seeking, a previously unexplored age group. The results provided insight on young learners' online information-seeking effectiveness in relation to their epistemic metacognition development. Suggestions for future research and avenues to incorporate the findings into professional practice are provided. |
