Enhancing Engineering Students’ Knowledge Of Information Literacy And Ethics Through An Interactive Online Learning Module

Abstract

His research interests include 1) Learning, teaching, and teacher education, 2) Motivation, critical thinking and decision making processes, and 3) Effect and implementation of technology in the classroom.

Examining In-Person and Asynchronous Information-Seeking Behavior Instruction Among First-Year Engineering Students

“…We were able to do so not by restricting where or how students access information, but instead by giving students agency to seek information where they choose and then training students to evaluate it with RADAR; students sought out reliable sources and avoided questionable sources of their own volition. These outcomes are consistent with the work of Xu, Dong, and Nawalaniec [7] and of Burns, Cunningham, and Foran-Mulcahy [24], who represent emerging views that carefully structured online teaching of information literary can be comparable to classroom versions.…”

“…While these studies suggest that online information-literacy instruction can be effective, it remains difficult to make comparisons between the effectiveness of online instruction and in-person instruction due to a lack of sufficient, rigorous literature to determine what is significant in this area. Research by Xu, Dong, and Nawalaniec [7] went a step further to directly compare the pre-and post-test results of students who had received information literacy and ethics instruction either during an in-person seminar or through an asynchronous online tutorial. Post-test improvements were noted for both seminar and online tutorial groups, leading the authors to conclude that online information literacy instruction is at least as effective as face-to-face instruction [7].…”

“…Research by Xu, Dong, and Nawalaniec [7] went a step further to directly compare the pre-and post-test results of students who had received information literacy and ethics instruction either during an in-person seminar or through an asynchronous online tutorial. Post-test improvements were noted for both seminar and online tutorial groups, leading the authors to conclude that online information literacy instruction is at least as effective as face-to-face instruction [7].…”

“…Although some studies are able to provide evidence that online instruction can be at least as effective as in-person instruction, many of these studies note that their findings are tentative and require further investigation [7], [28]. As a result, some authors continue to view online instruction with suspicion [5], [29].…”

“…Even less is known about the impact of asynchronous instructional methods on student learning. The limited number of studies on this topic tend to use pre-and post-test methodologies that do not directly observe student behavior following instruction, making it difficult to draw conclusions regarding the practical impact of these interventions on their information-seeking behavior [7].…”