Promoting reflection by students on their use of information

Abstract

For many years, information literacy frameworks have encouraged students to evaluate the quality of the material within the sources they access. Much less thought has been given to helping learners at the end of a school assignment to identify the benefits to their project that emerged when they drew upon their selected information. This report presents a two-year study in which two different Sixth Form groups were introduced to two models devised for this purpose. Each was based on well established ideas developed by experts in information behaviour. Many of the students, all of whom were candidates pursuing the Extended Project Qualification, made imaginative use of the models, which proved invaluable in enabling them to satisfy the course’s assessment objective relating to the exploitation of resources. The second framework, derived from research by Dervin and Reinhard, was received particularly enthusiastically, probably because the elements are more easily arranged in a chronological sequence, so enabling the learner to reconstruct the “story” of their research experience. It is, however, difficult to reach unequivocal conclusions about student preferences as each of the two groups was introduced to only one of the two models and the candidates did not have to choose between them.