The Wiki Quality Instrument (WQI) is a coding tool for evaluating the degree to which wikis provide opportunities for students to develop 21st century skills such as expert thinking, complex communication, and New Media Literacy. The tool was developed by Justin Reich, project manager of the Distributed Collaborative Learning Communities project, in consultation with Hunter Gehlbach, Richard Murnane, and John Willett over an 18-month period. The development process included extensive qualitative research in wiki-using classrooms, a literature review of research on 21st century skills and on evaluating skill development in online learning environments, and multiple rounds of pilot testing and iteration.
The main section of the Wiki Quality Instrument consists of 24 items divided into five subdomains. Two items on Information Consumption evaluate ways in which students use the wiki to access academic resources. Four items in the Participation subdomain evaluate the basic ways in which students contribute to the wiki. Five items in the Expert Thinking subdomain evaluate opportunities that students have to organize information, solve academic problems, reflect on their learning, credit sources, and receive feedback from educators. The seven items in the Complex Communication subdomain evaluate the degree to which students communicate and collaborate with other students. The six items in the New Media Literacy category measure the degree to which students use the various technical affordances of the wiki to share content, links, images, and multimedia. The WQI also includes demographic questions about grade level, academic subject area, hosting site, creators, participants and audience. Finally, the WQI includes four overall rating questions to be subjectively evaluated by raters.
On this website, we provide several resources for using and adapting the WQI. We designed the WQI to conduct a study of wikis used in U.S., K-12 settings. Our samples of wikis were used in Kindergarten through high school classrooms, in many different academic subject areas, and for many different purposes. Our version of the instrument is tailored to study opportunities for 21st skill development in this particular context. For researchers interested in similar contexts, we provide our coding manual, our training guidelines, and our evaluation protocols. We expect, however, that most researchers and educators will be interested in slightly different contexts and therefore interested in modifying our instrument and protocols. As a result, we also detail the processes by which we developed the WQI and its associated protocols, and we make suggestions for adapting the WQI for educational contexts and for other research contexts.
All of the materials on this site are licensed with a Creative Commons CC:BY license, and researchers and educators are encouraged to modify and re-use these materials. We welcome comments and questions, and we would especially appreciate hearing from other researchers using these tools. Please use the contact form at the top of the page to get in touch with us.
Our work has been generously supported by the Hewlett Foundation’s Open Education Resources initiative.
Wiki Quality Instrument and Protocol by Justin Reich is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.edtechresearcher.com.