This post has been written for the Information Literacy Group website by Andrew K. Shenton. You can read Andrew’s latest article in the Journal of Information Literacy here.
Over the last thirty years, I have undertaken various projects that have led to the development of models of information behaviour. Many have concentrated on children and young adults. Invariably the first question a reader asks me on seeing one of the models is the extent to which it is applicable to other groups, beyond that which formed the focus of the research.
Two separate incidents have prompted me to give greater thought to the matter. In the first, a student investigated the transferability of one of my earliest models to a different context. Specifically, a PhD candidate at the University of North Texas explored whether a model devoted to how UK pupils between four and eighteen years of age seek information via other people might also be relevant to pre-Kindergarten children in America. Such “confirmatory” studies are not unusual; Carol Kuhlthau’s Information Search Process model has long been the subject of much work of this kind by herself and others.
In the second incident five years after the first, I learnt that, as part of a coursework assignment, a US Higher Education student based at Oklahoma University had scrutinised a different model I had constructed with a view to ascertaining how accurately it represented her information behaviour in a particular instance. I had hinted somewhat at a similar possibility in a 2006 piece for Information Research Watch International, with my comment that readers may make their own links between a model’s components in the light of their personal experiences.
The second student’s work went on to inform my professional practice, as I quickly realised that an approach like hers could be taken by Sixth Formers pursuing the Extended Project Qualification (EPQ) in my school in order to review, at the end of the course, the study practices they had adopted while they had conducted their work. Once I had embedded this activity in my teaching, it became an important aspect of the candidates’ acquisition of information literacy. I recalled for my students an observation made by Tom Wilson in a 1999 paper on information behaviour. In his words, a model is a “framework for thinking”. In this instance, the EPQ candidates treated the model I had given them as a starting point. They pondered on how far the processes within it mirrored their own experiences and what changes they would have to make to the model if it was to reflect more accurately their information practices. Having now begun to think in abstractions, the more cognitively sophisticated Sixth Formers were able to design their own models showing what they had done and how the independent learning experience was for them. I saw two benefits in the work overall. Firstly, the activity provided an effective way of promoting students’ metacognition and, secondly, the youngsters’ ideas gave me insights into the wider applicability – or otherwise – of the model involved. The sequence of action had a pleasing circularity. In the first place, my original creation had been of use to a reader, then their interpretation of it in their situation triggered further thoughts from me, especially with regard to the model’s accuracy.
Viewing the two reported incidents in concert, then, we may say that verification of my models has taken place at an individual and a demographic group level. It came as no surprise to me in the light of the two experiences that not long after my submission of my latest model – which forms the subject of a new paper in the Journal of Information Literacy – the editor who read the piece was again interested in the question of transferability. In my December 2025 article, I propose a model that represents the ways in which the information needs of UK primary schoolers – children aged four to eleven – take on characteristics relating to academic, private and social dimensions. Some needs move between these different realms during the course of their life span.
We may wonder whether the patterns I had identified would be similarly apparent among secondary schoolers. I have carried out no work to investigate this matter specifically but on an intuitive level I suspect that the relationships shown in the model will indeed be prevalent among older students. There seems no reason why it may not be tentatively posited that the diagram will be appropriate for all youngsters who attend school. The nature of the relationships is bound to differ, though, depending on the student’s age. In the examples accompanying the model, I explain how, in the social dimension, the involvement of parents and older siblings may lead to some redefinition of the youngsters’ information needs; in the case of secondary schoolers, the role of peers and social media may well be greater in their lives. If this shift is believed to be so significant that it changes the emphasis of the model to the extent that it effectively distorts it and the model misrepresents the phenomenon it is intended to portray, then obviously some redrafting of the structure will be necessary.
Whilst many of their creators would, no doubt, like to imagine that their model provides an unequivocal representation of the reality with which they are concerned, and indeed the diagrammatic nature of these constructs may imbue them with what can seem systematic rigour, all models are essentially subjective. They reflect the worldview of the individual responsible for them and, on the most fundamental level, they have taken key decisions in terms of the factors that are – and are not – relevant to the phenomenon of interest. Then there is the question of the relative prominence that should be given to those that have been deemed pertinent. Wilson, again writing in his 1999 paper, suggests that models deal with either the causes and consequences of information behaviour or the interaction of the stages inherent in the process. Clearly, the focus of a model in this respect arises from the inclination of the creator. The individual also makes choices in terms of the data, literature, personal experience or other evidence on which they draw. Putting the subjective dimension aside, the model cannot be assumed to offer finality because the situation in question is likely to change with future developments. Consequently, a reader looking at a model that has been prepared, say, twenty years earlier may not be seeing an up-to-date picture. Every model is necessarily a limited one.