Monday, October 28, 2019
Laura Bredahl and Kari Weaver have been awarded the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) Research in Librarianship Grant.
The project, Exploring students’ information use through learner needs analysis, in a Canadian STEM context: Towards a collaborative approach to integrated instructional design, will examine the learning needs of undergraduate science students.
Learn more about CARL’s Research in Librarianship Grant.
Exploring students’ information use through learner needs analysis, in a Canadian STEM context: Towards a collaborative approach to integrated instructional design
Abstract: Students’ use of information is a challenge within undergraduate courses, including difficulty in identifying where to find appropriate information, proper citation, and information assessment that culminates in ineffective communication strategies. This distance between knowledge and expectation originates in the high school curriculum and lingers in behaviours demonstrated at the university level. This research asks the core question: What are the learning needs of undergraduate science students through a science curriculum? It seeks to answer this question through an investigation of their research and writing habits in biology courses, and will subsequently inform of student information use within the context of STEM undergraduate curriculums at Canadian academic institutions. These data are important to national scholarly conversations around the current state of undergraduate science students’ information use in an era of rapidly changing attitudes toward information behaviour and methods of scholarly communication. This study also provides the foundational learner and contextual analysis required to apply findings to an open, innovative, and interactive set of online instruction modules meant to be integrated into undergraduate curricula in biology.
