Navigating the EU: Evaluating the Effectiveness of a New Web-Based Tool to Make Students Better EU Learners and Citizens

Abstract

While search engines seem to have made the act of finding information as involving little more than clicking the mouse button, educational research reveals that searching for information is a highly complex task that demands no less than five different Information Problem Solving (IPS) skills. This paper outlines and evaluates a series of web-based exercises that have been developed in conjunction with a new textbook on EU-politics. Developing such exercises for teaching the EU is in particular relevant as students experience it as a distant, complex and boring institution. Based upon student evaluations I assess the value of the exercises for student-learning and their potential for improving IPS-skills.

Keywords: EU-Politics, Interactive exercises, ICT, Web-based exercises, IPS-skills