Mapping the development of critical information behaviour through school and university

Mapping the
development of critical
information behaviour
through school and
university
Sheila Webber
Andrew Madden*
Nigel Ford
Mary Crowder
i3, RGU, Aberdeen, June 2017
Photo of Mountbatten cat: Peter Reid
University of Sheffield iSchool
*Sun Yat-Sen University

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research
Council, 2010-12 (15 months)
Professor Nigel
Ford - Principal
Investigator
Mary Crowder -
Researcher
Dr Andrew
Madden -
Researcher
Sheffield University, Information School, Centre for Information Literacy Research
Webber,Ford,Madder,Crowder2017

Research Questions relevant to this
presentation
1. How does critical information behaviour develop
through school and university?
2. What are the main differences in the information
behaviour of students at different points in their
development through school and university – and
particularly as they transition from school to
university?

Methods
• Qualitative
– 72 one-to-one interviews (teachers, librarians and university
students)
– 86 people in focus groups (the under-18s at schools, 6th
form colleges/Further Education)
• Quantitative.
– Testing elements in a model of intrinsic/extrinsic motivation
and effort (derived from Crowder & Pupynin,1993), mostly 5
point Likert scales
– Minor differences in questionnaires for schools etc. and
universities administered online and in print
– Used SPSS for analysis; ANOVAs, correlation and
regression analysis. The ANOVA analysis is presented here

Samples: Questionnaires analysed
School children
• Female - 414
• Male - 286
• Total - 700
Key stage 3 (ages 12-14: 240); Key stage
4 (15-16: 119); Key stage 5 (16-18: 341)
From 8 secondary schools and 3
sixth form colleges in South
Yorkshire
University students
• Female - 405
• Male - 270
• Total - 675
From 4 universities in South
Yorkshire and the Midlands
Notes: original sample size was 802 school + 948 university students: data was cleaned by removing those
educated previously outside the UK, and by stratified random deselection of female participants in order to
control for the effect of gender, to enable comparison across study level

Theoretical frameworks
• Research into approaches to learning (e.g. Marton
et al. 1984)
• IB and Information Literacy (IL) research which
focuses on motivation/ study approaches/ personal
characteristics (e.g. Ford et al, 2003)
• Model developed by Crowder & Pupynin (1993) into
motivation for training
• Ford (1986) deep critical information behaviour

Example question
(Based on subjects compulsory at KS3)

Example question

Motivation
• KS4 students were more motivated than KS5
students by wanting to avoid failure
• KS5 students were more motivated by learning as
much as they could, and pleasing other people than
were undergraduates

Independent information seeking
• KS3 students perceived themselves more than did
KS4 students to be required to engage in
independent information seeking
• KS5 students were more involved in independent
information seeking than those in KS4
• Relative to KS5 students, undergraduate students
(i.e. years 1 to 3 taken as a group) were required
even more to engage in independent information
seeking

Trustworthiness
• KS3 students put in more effort [than KS4 students] into
finding information, ensuring that it was trustworthy, and
understanding it before making use of it
• Undergraduates felt more than KS5 students that finding
information takes a lot of effort, but that it makes work
more interesting
• Undergraduates found it more satisfying to know that
information was trustworthy, and felt less need than did
KS5 students for teachers to give more guidance in
relation to selecting acceptable sources

Understanding
• KS5 students felt more than did undergraduates that
they could get good marks without really understanding
the information being used
• Relative to undergraduates, they wanted more teacher
guidance than they were receiving in how to use
information
• Undergraduates thought (more than did KS5 students)
that understanding information makes work more
satisfying, and they put more effort into trying to
understand information

• Many teachers in school and college suggested that
pressure to meet government targets has resulted
in students being spoon-fed towards exams, with
less emphasis on the development of skills to find
and use information in support of their own learning
• One sixth-form teacher said that when they teach
outside the curriculum the students question why
they are doing something that is not on the syllabus

Strategic approach
• “On-line? Well first thing I would do is like if I am doing physics
and it’s AQA I will go straight onto AQA website and look at the
syllabus for the subject I am doing then work on from that.
“Right so do they have links out from there or?
“No it’s just I need to know what that is, it’s just like basically
explains what you need to know, and you can just like figure it
out from that what you need to learn.”
• Prefers the format that has the most explicit match with the task
“It’s not always tailored to your exam board when you go on line
but then when you get the book it’s exactly to your exam board.
So it’s to exactly your specification.
“Is that the most important thing when you are looking for
information?
“Yes. “ (6th form school student)

Relevance
• KS5 students found it more satisfying [than did KS4
students] when they could see how things were
relevant, and from understanding the information they
were using – into which they put a lot of effort
• For undergraduates, deciding what was relevant took a
lot of effort, and they were less confident of being able
to do so, although establishing relevance was felt to
make work more interesting
• UG students struggled more to understand what is
required for a good piece of work, and found it much
less easy to keep up with all the work they had to do

Wikipedia
• K3 students made more use of Wikipedia in their
work, rating it more highly as a good source of basic
information, useful for understanding a new topic,
and more reliable
• KS5 students considered Wikipedia a good place to
obtain basic information more than did KS4
students

• Undergraduates reported more than KS5 students that
teachers told them not to use Wikipedia in their work,
and that they made less use of it
• They also felt less that Wikipedia is a reliable source…
… but more that it is a good place to obtain basic
information…
… and more that they made use of it when they wanted
to learn about a new topic.

Final thoughts
Photo of Mountbatten cat: Peter Reid

• Issue worth probing more around KS4 (which is when
students face first set of crucial examinations at
secondary level)
• KS4 felt they are doing less independent information
seeking than KS3 or KS5, they put less effort into
finding, evaluating and understanding information than
did KS3, were more motivated by fear of failure than
KS5
• Also interesting to probe possible changing attitudes of
student + their teachers through different levels

Sheila Webber
Information School, University of Sheffield, UK
s.webber@sheffield.ac.uk
http://information-literacy.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @sheilayoshikawa
Dr Andrew Madden
Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China
madden@sysu.edu.cn
Professor Nigel Ford
Information School, University of Sheffield, UK
n.ford@sheffield.ac.uk
Mary Crowder
Minds at Work
m.crowder@sheffield.ac.uk

References
• Crowder, M. and Pupynin, K. (1993) The motivation to train: a review of
the literature and the development of a comprehensive model of
training motivation. Minds at Work, for the Department of Employment.
• Ford, N. (1986). Psychological determinants of information needs: a
small-scale study of higher education students. Journal of librarianship
and information science, 18(1), 47-62.
• Ford, N., Miller, D and Moss, N. (2003). Web search strategies and
approaches to studying. Journal of the American Society of Information
Science and Technology, 54(6), 473-489.
• Marton, F., Hounsell, D. and Entwistle, N. (Eds.) (1984) The Experience
of learning: implications for teaching and studying in higher education.
Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press.

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Mapping the development of critical information behaviour through school and university