Recognizing required changes to higher education engineering programs’ information literacy education as a consequence of research problems becoming more complex

Abstract

Challenges in the Earth’s sustainable development set requirements to modern engineering education. Engineers face complex problems, which need to be solved to keep the planet viable for future generations. This study was conducted to find out what kind of changes should be made to the practice and to the content of information literacy (IL) education in order to provide students attending higher education engineering programs with knowledge and skills they need in solving the engineering problems of the modern world. While IL teaching resources at Lappeenranta Academic Library are limited, IL education at the Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT) is carried out either online or as brief IL education sessions, which are integrated in substance education. This study focuses on the effects of brief integrated IL education on students’ information literacy and their ability to recognize the complex issues of their research problems.

This study reports how brief IL education can be developed to fulfill the information literacy needs of modern engineering research and design successfully. Brief IL education sessions, which based on results of observations about IL skills and knowledge that student lack, were integrated in mechanical engineering seminar courses which aimed at finding the most sustainable materials for given application and in a basic course of environmental technology. The objective was to find out if students’ research accomplishments and research understanding would benefit from the brief IL sessions.

The research based on transcribed student answers to surveys and interviews, which were analyzed according to the Miles & Huberman method and teachers’ evaluations of learning outcomes. Classifications for categorizing student answers were created to study changes in their information searching and research skills. The qualitative results were quantified according to the classifications. Changes in searching skills were studied by using the Webropol survey tool before and after IL education to find out about changes in the use of search words and information sources. Mechanical engineering seminar students’ research problem formulations analyses based on a four-step classification which was created for this research by applying Ackoff’s knowledge hierarchy (Ackoff 1989) and Fava’s sustainability maturity curve (Fava 2014, Burgess 2014). The development of students’ information search questions was studied by using a six-point classification tool which is based on the model of the stages of information searching presented by Kuhlthau (1993) and further developed by Vakkari (2000) and on the six cognitive process categories of Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson, Krathwohl 2001). Both analyses, the research problem formulation and information search question development, were done from the perspective of sustainability issues appearing in students’ questionnaire answers.

Based on the results, brief integrated IL education appears to advance students’ searching skills, their ability to understand and outline their research problem, and the way they formulate their information search questions to find literature for solving the interdisciplinary research problem at hand. Integrating the presented kind of brief IL education sessions into substance education enhances students’ understanding of the complexity of their research problems and the procedure to find suitable information to solve those problems. In addition to developing their ability to do research, they also learn to observe their problems from a wider perspective and e.g. take into account sustainability challenges of their topics. From the engineering program’s viewpoint, the fact that students engage in interdisciplinary issues of their research problem as a result of integrated IL education is an advantage and saves faculty teaching resources when experts of all linking disciplines do not need to participate in instruction.