Finding and Contextualizing Resources: A Digital Literacy Tool's Impact in Ninth-Grade World History

Although the Internet has been touted as a boon to social studies education, little research exists that documents the impact of using it as a contextualizing tool for analyzing primary sources and developing Web sites on high school students' achievement. In this article, the authors address both issues by using a quasi-experimental design to measure impact on student achievement. However, there was no appreciable difference in student achievement, and the provided assignment and amount of content that students were expected to learn in the unit of study may have hindered higher-order thinking. The authors discuss the implications of these findings.