This blog post is by Andrew K. Shenton. It highlights the issues from the associated paper, Promoting reflection by students on their use of information. Full-text can be accessed via the link, or via Journal of Information Literacy page.
Information professionals who are based in schools and involved in supporting Sixth Formers studying for the Extended Project Qualification (EPQ) will doubtless be more aware than most of the need for young people to take a questioning attitude to the material they access for their work. Indeed, this requirement is fundamental to the EPQ course’s second assessment objective (devoted to the use of resources), and 20% of the marks overall are allocated to this area. Although the expectation that candidates should demonstrate – in the words of the specification – “critical analysis and application of the resources” (1) can be interpreted in various ways, the associated tasks that students undertake are often concentrated in the first half of their projects. More specifically, my own experience tells me that most of those youngsters who apply an analytical mindset do so mainly at the point when they first access content. They may consult an evaluative checklist to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the material in front of them and whether they should use the item in their work. Few go on subsequently to think so critically about the sources as their project takes shape. Many simply slot into their unfolding essay relevant material they have taken from the documents they have selected. This action is consistent with what Amanda Spink and Charles Cole believe to be the traditional view of what constitutes information. Drawing on the ideas of Brenda Dervin, the authors posit that here, rather than being regarded as fodder for learning, information was understood as “brick-like”; a user who had located relevant material “then took the information brick and placed it in whatever document he or she was writing”, e.g. an essay or report (2). For a lot of youngsters, once such a brick has been suitably incorporated into their work, analytical thinking about that information tends to be limited.
In my recent paper for the Journal of Information Literacy, I have suggested that we should urge students to take a more extensive critical view of information. In particular, I have put forward two tools that may be offered by educators to encourage learners to consider, at the end of their work, how the sources they have consulted have actually been of help. What, specifically, have they contributed to the final outcome? We may well wonder why relatively little attention has been given to this area in the past. There is, of course, good reason why critical thought about information should be front-loaded in a student project. It is important that, from the outset, youngsters focus their efforts on high quality material; if any information relevant to the topic is accessed and exploited, and no questions are asked as to its calibre, clearly the standard of both the end product and any associated learning will suffer. Given this problem, and that information is now so easily available from a range of providers without any quality controls being in place before it reaches the end-user, it is hardly surprising that recent years have seen the emergence of a multiplicity of frameworks for evaluating information. The best known include IF I APPLY, SIFT, CRAAP, TRAAP, RADAR and the 5Ws. I have long been concerned that relatively little has been done to help students determine, retrospectively, how far and in what ways material they have accessed has actually proved useful. This is despite the fact that what youngsters learn in this respect may be of value to them in the future.
My new paper presents two frameworks which, I hope, will address the imbalance somewhat. Both are derived from the ideas of well respected writers on information behaviour. The first draws on Ross Todd’s Theory of Information Intents (3); the second takes as its inspiration prompts put forward by Dervin and CarrieLynn Reinhard in a study of Higher Education participants in Ohio (4). In a project that ran over two academic years, I tested each model with EPQ candidates aged between sixteen and eighteen in my own school in Whitley Bay, in the north-east of England. The tools were introduced separately, with different groups, and at no point were the learners asked to choose between them. Consequently, any comparisons that are made in the paper with regard to how they were received by the students are entirely my own. Further development of my work on Sixth Formers’ critical use of information was curtailed by my retirement around Christmas 2023. Had my research continued subsequently, I may well have asked future groups of students to compare the two structures and inquired which they preferred and why. I would also have liked to develop further such tools, thereby giving future learners a greater choice as to the model that they might use.
I view as complementary the tools for evaluating information at the outset and those for exploring at the end of a project the contributions that particular sources have made. In concert, they encourage students to think critically about items at different points in their work. The well established assessment models devised by others perhaps encourage a dogmatic, generic perspective and, no doubt, a range of people examining the same sources would share a similar view in relation to the highlighted criteria, whereas the frameworks I have devised more recently invite students to concentrate on the use of the items in their own particular context.
I am reasonably satisfied that both tools featured in the new paper were effective in the EPQ situation for which they were designed and on occasions I marvelled at the originality with which the youngsters applied them in their own circumstances. I noted, too, how secondary benefits with respect to metacognition arose. Students found themselves thinking – in ways they had not previously considered – about how they had assembled their essays. Several admitted privately to me that they had never given so much thought to deconstructing their work for their teacher or an assessor.
I would be reluctant, however, to speculate on how successful or otherwise the models might be when applied with younger or less able students. It is important, as well, to understand that they were generally enthusiastically embraced by candidates who recognised their value in enabling them to satisfy a particular course assessment objective. In other learning scenarios that are not so process driven and the student’s decision-making is deemed less important than the final product, it may prove much harder to sell the methods to learners. Readers whose responsibilities lie with young children may find the wording of some of the prompts offered in the models inappropriate but they may still serve as food for thought when considering the kinds of issues that less experienced learners may benefit from addressing.
References
AQA (2021) Level 3 Extended Project Qualification (7993). Available at: https://filestore.aqa.org.uk/subjects/AQA-W-7993-SP-19.PDF
Spink, A. and Cole, C. (2006) New Directions in Human Information Behavior. Springer.
Todd, R.J. (2005) ‘Information Intents’, in Fisher, K. E., Erdelez, S., McKechnie, L. Theories of Information Behaviour. Information Today, Inc, pp. 198-203.
Dervin, B., Reinhard, C. D. (2007) ‘How Emotional Dimensions of Situated Information Seeking Relate to User Evaluations of Help from Sources: an Exemplar Study Informed by Sense-Making Methodology’, in Nahl, D., Bilal, D., Information and Emotion: The Emergent Affective Paradigm in Information Behavior Research and Theory. Information Today, Inc, pp. 51-84.