Exploring educational standard alignment

Asso for Info Science & Tech

2014

Primary and secondary (K–12) teachers form the essential core of children's formal learning before adulthood. Even though teaching is a mainstream, information‐rich profession, teachers are understudied as information users. More specifically, not much is known about teacher personal information management (PIM). Teacher PIM is critically important, as teachers navigate a complex information space complicated by the duality of digital and physical information streams and changing demands on instruction. Our research study increases understanding of teacher PIM and informs the development of tools to support educators. Some important unknowns exist about teachers as information users: What are teachers' PIM practices? What are the perceived consequences of these practices for teaching and learning? How can PIM practices be facilitated to benefit teaching and learning? This study employed a qualitative research design, with interviews from 24 primary and secondary teachers. We observed various systems for information organization, and teachers report their systems to be effective. Important sources for teachers' information in order of importance are personal collections, close colleagues, and the Internet. Key findings reveal that inheriting and sharing information play an important part in information acquisition for teachers and that information technology supporting education creates unintentional demands on information management. The findings on the nature of teacher information, teacher information finding, keeping, and organizational practices have important implications for teachers themselves, school principals, digital library developers, school librarians, curriculum developers, educational technology developers, and educational policy makers.

Section: Keeping Informationmentioning

confidence: 72%

Teacher Personal information management (PIM) practices: Finding, keeping, and Re‐Finding information

Asso for Info Science & Tech

2014

“…Decisions to keep digital information appeared to be driven by a teacher's context, including student grade level, curriculum, and existing materials for a topic. The different aspects of teachers' contexts drove the relevance assessments (Reitsma, Dalton, and Cyr, 2008) and resulted in the decision whether to print, download, or bookmark the information. For some, hardly any resource ever gets left behind completely unless there is a time crunch [#4].…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Personal information management practices of teachers

Proc. Am. Soc. Info. Sci. Tech.

2011

Teaching is an information-rich profession with increasing demands on accountability and performance. Ideally, a well-managed information space provides teachers with relevant information when they need it, thus increasing their efficiency and efficacy and conceivably improving teaching quality. Little is known about teacher personal information management (PIM). This exploratory study employed interviews to establish a context to study teacher PIM. The study found that teachers draw information from a variety of physical and digital sources, and while they were aware of sources that had valuable information, especially digital libraries and their school library media centers, they rarely used them. Teachers used distinctive personal organization schemes to manage their information, sorting information alphabetically, topically, and by educational standards. This study introduced the observed phenomenon of "information heritage," where teachers were handed down information from their predecessors and then had to choose what to do with it and how to incorporate it into their PIM practices. Teachers store their information physically in cabinets, closets, and shelves, and digitally on their computer hard drives, school group drives, and using bookmarks. Ephemeral information created by teachers often has time management purposes.

The notion of relevance in teacher information behavior

2012

Proc of Assoc for Info

Educators use information to support their teaching, which is largely concerned with the transfer of information. To support this information exchange, teachers manage complex information environments that are continually changing based on outside influences. Decisions on when to go out and seek additional information, what information to incorporate, and what information to dispose of are all based on notions of relevance. This exploratory study found that notions of relevance are largely driven by the educational context and are therefore unique to this particular user group. Relevance is often prescriptive for teachers, that is, information needs are driven by curriculum and school policy. Teachers also appear to stack the deck when looking for relevant resources, increasing their chances for finding a good resource fit by drawing on shared experience and information from close colleagues. Resource selection is again curriculum based, but also has the interesting feature that teachers are proxies for relevance decisions that affect their students. Anticipated relevance is present in various aspects of teachers' personal information management (PIM), such as deciding whether to keep resources for future use, organizing their physical classroom space, and resource housekeeping decisions.