October 2012 Volume 15 Number 4 - Educational Technology ...

The author browse function
Figure 8 shows the student interface of using the “author browse” function to gather information for problem solving.
The student can select an author, and then select a title based on the selected author to browse the content that might
be relevant to the question.
Study 1: Teachers’ feedback of using Library-Quest
An experiment has been conducted to evaluate the “perceived ease of use,” “perceived usefulness” and “attitude
toward using” of 103 elementary and high school teachers (the learning activity designers). The participants first
experienced the learning activity development and analysis functions as well as the problem-solving interface of
Library-Quest; next, they were arranged to use the problem-solving interface of Library-Quest to search for data
from the electronic library to answer the questions concerning the ecological issues of the Chiku wetland in southern
Taiwan. The Chiku wetland is the largest and the most intact lagoon in Taiwan. The main water source of the
wetland is the Zengwun River which brings large varieties of biological, nutritive products, forming the excellent
habitat. Many shorebirds, wildfowl and egrets gather on sandbars in the river, the most famous being the black-faced
spoonbill. There are less than 2,000 black-faced spoonbills on the planet, of which 850 stay on the fish farm in the
Chiku wetland each year from October to February. In this learning activity, the participants were asked to answer
the following questions concerning the Chiku wetland:
(1) What are the representative birds in the Chiku ecological region in Taiwan? How are they distributed in this
region?
(2) What are the migratory birds in Tainan which forage in the Chiku fish ponds? Does this area provide enough
food for them?
(3) What are the representative plants in the Chiku wetlands? Do they have special features that are different from
the plants in other areas?
(4) The government would like to urbanize the Chiku region. Do you agree with this? Why or why not?
After experiencing the use of the electronic library and the learning activity development procedure, the teachers
were asked to complete a questionnaire that consists of three scales (six items for each scale), presented with strongly
agree/disagree statements on a six-point Likert scale. Two experts in the field of Internet-based instruction had
commented on the items of the questionnaire for face validity, and two elementary school teachers had been selected
to clarify the wording of each item. A detailed description of the three scales is presented below.
(1) Perceived usefulness scale: assessing perceptions of the degree to which teachers expect that using Library-
Quest will enhance students’ learning performance.
(2) Attitude toward using scale: measuring perceptions of the degree to which teachers will be willing to use it and
recommend it to peers.
(3) Perceived ease of use scale: exploring perceptions of the degree to which teachers expect Library-Quest to be
free of effort.
Teachers’ feedback via exploratory factor analysis
In accordance with the suggestions of Henson and Roberts (2006), Lee, Johanson, and Tsai (2008), and Worthington
and Whittaker (2006), this study first examined the KMO measure of sampling adequacy index and Bartlett’s test of
sphericity to ensure whether the samples are appropriate for exploratory factor analysis. The results indicated that the
KMO measure of sampling adequacy index was 0.84, and Bartlett’s test of sphericity was significant (χ 2 (df = 78, n
=103) = 966.99, p < .0001), showing that the samples are appropriate for this kind of analysis. Then, a principle
components analysis with an oblique rotation was implemented on these items. According to the factors of the
questionnaire seemed to be correlated, an oblique rotation was applied in this study. In addition, a combination of
methods (e.g., conceptual clarity, eigenvalue > 1, and scree plots) were utilized to decide the number of the retained
factors, suggesting that three factors should be retained. For the final version of the questionnaire, an item within a
factor was retained only when its pattern coefficient (factor loading) was greater than 0.50 on the relevant factor and
less than 0.50 on the non-relevant factor. Consequently, the initial 18 items were reduced to 13 items in the final
version of the questionnaire (shown in Appendix A), and the total variance explained is 75.10%.
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