Assessing Information Literacy Skills Demonstrated in an Engineering Design Task

Abstract

Background Practicing engineers must continuously renew their knowledge and skills in order to remain competitive in the field. Yet, recent studies have found very little improvement in engineering graduates' lifelong learning skills. Research on information literacy, a critical component of lifelong learning, in technical fields is limited. Purpose/Hypothesis This study sought to evaluate the information skills of first‐year engineering students. Specifically, it investigated the extent to which students gather information from a variety of sources and from high‐quality sources, use gathered information to support an argument, and document information sources. Design/Method This study used content analysis of memos written by teams of engineering students. A random sample of 40 memos, selected from a pool of 263, was coded using InfoSEAD, a structured coding protocol developed for this study. Results Overall, 82% of the sources used were Web resources, of which 12% were of high quality. From the information threads that could be traced to the original source, 68% were relevant and used appropriately. Due to documentation errors in the memos, 28% of the sources cited could not be classified, and 57% of the information threads identified could not be traced to the original source. Conclusions Student teams mostly relied on Web resources, but their documentation skills were weak. When students did successfully document information, it was generally done appropriately.

Effects of an educational intervention on the technical writing competence of engineering students

“…A common error was to reference their information sources without providing fields necessary to trace the original sources. These kind of difficulties were also found by Wertz, Purzer, Fosmire & Cardella (2013) among engineering freshmen students. It can be concluded that educational intervention allowed the students to recognize the importance of using bibliographic references; however, it is necessary to reinforce teaching related to the citation and referencing format at any phase of the intervention.…”

“…In other cases, the students cite the sources correctly, but without any reference to them in the text. These results indicate that the documentation skills of engineering students are an area that requires further research (Wertz, Purzer, Fosmire, & Cardella, 2013).…”

“…The engineering education literature classifies into four categories the information literacy: information gathering, information evaluation, information application, and information documentation (Wertz, Purzer, Fosmire, & Cardella, 2013). The technical writing fits into the information documentation category.…”

“…In the literature, there are studies of methodologies developed to include this competence in the curriculum (Beaufort, 2007), studies of how the engineers write (Winsor, 1990), identification of the most common writings of engineering (Zhu, 2004;Horowitz, 1986), the importance of the writing competence in engineering education (Zhu, 2004), among others. However, researchers suggest that graduates of these careers still have insufficiencies when writing (Nair, Patil, & Mertova, 2009;Armstrong, Dannatt, & Evans, 2012;Goldsmith, Willey, & Boud, 2012;Christiansen, et al, 2014;Wertz, Purzer, Fosmire, & Cardella, 2013).…”

“…Some studies have found that first-year engineering students have difficulty citing several kinds of resources in their bibliographies, for example, citing Web resources in their reports (Wertz, Purzer, Fosmire, & Cardella, 2013). In other cases, the students cite the sources correctly, but without any reference to them in the text.…”