This article reports on a field study of the information behavior of Grade 8 students researching an inquirybased class history project. Kuhlthau's 7-stage Information Search Process (ISP) model forms the conceptual framework for the study. The aim of the study was to define an end game for the ISP model by answering the following question: How do the student participants' feelings, thoughts, and information behavior lead to the construction of new knowledge? Study findings tentatively indicate that knowledge construction results from an iterative process between the student and information, which can be divided into 3 phases. In the first phase, the students formulate questions from their previous knowledge to start knowledge construction; in the second phase, newly found topic information causes students to ask questions; and in the third phase, the students answer the questions asked by this newly found topic information. Based on these results and Kuhlthau's own ISP stage 7 assessment definition of the ISP model end game, we propose a model of knowledge construction inserted as an extra row in the ISP model framework.
IntroductionThis article reports on the findings of a field study of the feelings, thoughts, and actions of 10 Grade 8 students as they seek, find, and use information for an inquiry-based class history project. The conceptual framework for the study is Kuhlthau's (1993b) Information Search Process (ISP) model, one of the most cited information-seeking models in information science over the last 20 years (Blessinger & Hrycaj, 2010;Levitt & Thelwall, 2009;Whitmire, 1999). The ISP model is a middle-range model (see Chatman, 1996, p. 19, note 1) devoted to describing and predicting the information-seeking behavior of one group of information users: students researching an inquiry-based school assignment.The originality of the ISP model is that it divides the student's construction of the school assignment into six stages, thus linking the student's information need and consequent information seeking and use to the concept of temporality (Beheshti, Cole, Abuhimed, & Lamoureux, 2015). In this temporal approach, the student feels, thinks, and seeks information differently depending on the stage of his ISP. At its conception, the ISP model's temporal conceptualization of information need, seeking, and use was in contrast to the prevailing model of information need as a static state of mind (Bates, 1989). The second innovation of the ISP model is that it describes the role of the student's feelings, thoughts, and actions in (a) constructing the school assignment and (b) directing the student's information-seeking behavior to effectuate this construction. There is a content side to information, but there is a procedural side to it as well-the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that lead to the construction of new knowledge.The aim of the study reported on in this article is to extend the Kuhlthau ISP model by investigating how a study group of Grade 8 students' feelings, thoughts, and information behavi...