Student use of electronic information services in further education

Abstract

Urquhart,C., Thomas, R., Spink, S., Fenton, R., Yeoman, A., Lonsdale, R., Armstrong, C., Banwell, L., Ray, K., Coulson, G. & Rowley, J. (2005). Student use of electronic information services in further education. International Journal of Information Management, 25(4), 347-362. Sponsorship: JISCThis paper presents a profile of user behaviour in relation to the use of electronic information services (EIS), information skills, and the role of training and wider learning experiences in UK further education colleges. The research was conducted under the JISC User Behavior Monitoring and Evaluation Framework. Work was conducted in two strands, by two project teams, JUSTEIS and JUBILEE. JUSTEIS profiled the use of EIS and assessed the availability of EIS. JUBILEE objectives focussed on understanding the barriers and enablers, with a view to developing success criteria. JUSTEIS used a multi-stage stratified sampling process, and collected data from 270 respondents from 17 departments in the baseline survey (2001/2002). JUBILEE conducted in-depth fieldwork in five institutions and snapshot fieldwork in ten institutions, collecting data from 528 respondents. Information skills and experience develop across work, home and study. There is a growing use of EIS in curriculum, but practice varies between institutions and disciplines. Tutors express concern about student?s ability to evaluate and use the information that they find. Assignments can promote EIS use. The main categories of EIS used by students are search engines, and organisational web sites. Search engines are the preferred search tool, and search strategies are basic. Information skills are acquired through a variety of routes, with peer instruction, surfing and personal experience, instruction from tutors, and LIS induction and training all making an important contribution. The solutions to improving students? information skills may include use of the Virtual Training Suites, but librarians need to adopt different roles in promoting and evaluating use of such tools.Peer reviewe

Exploring the information seeking behavior of Greek graduate students: A case study set in the University of Macedonia

“…The present study confirmed the results of a previous study about discipline and information seeking behavior among Greek graduate students of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Korobili et al, 2011). In both studies it was found that the information seeking behavior of respondents seemed not to be affected by their discipline, which is in agreement with some earlier studies (Ellis et al, 1993;Heinström, 2003;Sharifabadi, 1996) but contrary to some other significant studies reported in the literature (George et al, 2006;Kerins et al, 2004;Makani & WooShue, 2006;Sadler & Given, 2007;Nicholas et al, 2009;Talja & Maula, 2003;Urquhart et al, 2005;Whitmire, 2002). However, in this study statistically significant relationships were found between disciplines and students' preferences for initiating a search for relevant information.…”

“…In relation to cognitive processes and the academic environment, some studies have found that discipline plays a significant role in information seeking (George et al, 2006;Kerins et al, 2004;Makani & WooShue, 2006;Nicholas, Clark, Rowlands, & Jamali, 2009;Whitmire, 2002;Sadler & Given, 2007;Talja & Maula, 2003;Urquhart et al, 2005), while others have noticed the existence of significant variations between different institutions (Nicholas, Huntington, & Jamali, 2007;Nicholas et al, 2009) due to different "faculty models of research behavior" (Barrett, 2005). However, a number of studies also found little or no correlation between discipline and information seeking behavior (Ellis, Cox, & Hall, 1993;Heinström, 2003;Korobili, Malliari, & Zapounidou, 2011;Sharifabadi, 1996).…”

Factors that Influence Information-Seeking Behavior: The Case of Greek Graduate Students

“…Many studies consider that discipline plays a vital role in information-seeking behavior. [3][4][5] Specifically, Sadler & Given 6 found that there were differences in the attitudes of social sciences graduate students toward e-journals versus their peers in the sciences and engineering. While Rowlands & Nicholas 7 found accumulated evidence of domain differences in information behavior.…”

“…[76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83] Searching databases or e-journals was not as popular as search engines. [84][85][86][87] The greatest percentage of graduate students in the study, regardless of their discipline, had more than 5 years of experience in using computers and the Internet and less than 5 years of experience in using databases and ejournals. Accordingly, most respondents perceived themselves as very experienced in retrieving information from search engines.…”

User perceptions of online public library catalogues

“…This trend was confirmed by the results of a survey carried in 2001-2003 on further education (FE) colleges in UK, which showed that FE students do not use OPACs as much as they use other sources of information such as Internet search engines or organisational websites. Therefore researchers are eager to assess user satisfaction with library services and for this they have used both qualitative and quantitativeled studies to measure user levels of satisfaction with library services [24]. Moreover, as library managers are enthusiastic to know what differences their library services make to Learning, Teaching and Research (LTR), there have been an increasing number of studies on different approaches and methods for measuring the impact of these services on academic life [19,7].…”