Back in May 2023, I was due to give a short presentation at a meeting of the University Science and Technology Librarians Group (USTLG). I had planned to give a brief overview of my proposed PhD research into women engineering students, and to talk about some of the insights into the practicalities of teaching IL to engineering students that I’ve gleaned from my literature reviewing.
Unfortunately, I was bedridden with a rather nasty bout of covid at the time, so I never made it to the meeting! With apologies to the organisers and those I should have been chatting to that day, here is, more or less, what I would have said…
At this early stage in my PhD research, I am mainly immersed in literature reviewing. What follows is not a comprehensive literature review, but a few key themes that have occurred to me while reading, and that I’ve seen already having an impact on the way I approach IL teaching with engineering students.
Student behaviour reflects professional behaviour
Many of the habits we see in engineering students, and perhaps bemoan as not being optimal information literacy, are actually reflective of the behaviours that practicing engineers exhibit in the workplace (Mercer et al., 2019).
For example, engineering students heavily rely on internet sources, and use social information practices such as asking the people around them for help (Dommermuth & Roberts, 2022). Similarly, practicing engineers will use a wide variety of non-scholarly information sources (Kaufman et al., 2019; Waters et al., 2012), and regularly use other people as sources of information (Robinson, 2010).
However, one area in which the behaviour of engineering undergraduates may fall short of that of professionals is in project scoping (Dera et al., 2020), evaluating information, filtering, and surfacing relevant information from within sources (Makhafola & Van Deventer, 2020). These are considered key professional competencies by engineers (Leiss & Ludwig, 2018; Waters et al., 2012), so will be key areas required for development on entering the workplace.
Another key finding is that engineering students tend to rate their information skills highly, even when their actual competence is low (Makhafola & Van Deventer, 2020; Phillips et al., 2019). This has clear implications for IL teaching: it is difficult to help students learn if they believe they already have the necessary skills!
Design rather than research
The language we use in discussing information literacy may also have an effect. At my own institution, the modules I teach in are usually described as “research skills”, so that is the term that I use. However, engineers consider their work to involve “design” rather than “research” (Fosmire & Radcliffe, 2014).
I have found Fosmire and Radcliffe’s Information-rich Engineering Design (IrED) model an enormously useful way of incorporating IL into the engineering classroom. The model associates information seeking or creating activities with each stage of the engineering design process. I’ve only used this in my teaching a couple of times, but it does seem to resonate with students and has allowed them to more easily relate what I am teaching to their practical design work.
Academic perspective
The literature on what engineering academics think of information literacy is unfortunately not encouraging! Engineering academics may see information literacy either irrelevant to their courses (Ward & Kim, 2019) or as valuable only in later years of study (Leckie & Fullerton, 1999). However, where librarians have collaborated with academics in STEM disciplines, this has been seen as valuable (Lovett et al., 2016).
As mentioned in my LILAC presentation, the accreditation standards for engineering courses rarely mention IL, positioning it as something that is just “picked up” rather than actively taught. This strikes me as reflecting an assumption I have commonly encountered among the academics I work with, that students just need to be shown how to get into the library catalogue and databases, and the rest is easy from there. Of course, we know as librarians that this is not usually the case!
IL teaching methods
The literature on IL teaching methods in engineering courses is inconsistent and inconclusive. There are lots of small-scale studies done of various teaching interventions, but a systematic review concluded that most of this research was not sufficiently rigorous to draw conclusions from. However, it is likely that working in collaboration with academic staff (Phillips et al., 2018) and using problem-based learning methods (Hsieh & Knight, 2008) are among the more effective methods.
Also of note is the way that information literacy develops over time. Information seeking, gathering, evaluation and use tends to become more complex and sophisticated as students advance through their courses (Baer & Li, 2009; Douglas, Epps, et al., 2015; Douglas, Rohan, et al., 2014; Douglas, Wertz, et al., 2014; Hagiwara et al., 2022; Talikka et al., 2018), therefore a scaffolded approach may be more effective than single classes targeted at first and final years.
Where are the women?
The focus of my own research is on the experiences of women engineering students in particular. So, I have been paying attention to the gender balance of the various studies I have read.
Most LIS studies into engineering students have an all-male, or majority-male population. So far I have only come across two all-female studies (Davis, 2023; Tran et al., 2018). Many papers don’t mention the gender balance of their participants at all. Those that do don’t often address gender as a potential variable of concern.
A small number of papers find differences in the information behaviour or literacy of women compared to men (e.g. Gowri & Padma, 2018; Liu & Sun, 2012), but the findings in these papers are inconsistent with each other.
The lack of studies focused on female research participants tells me that women are underrepresented in the literature on the information literacy and behaviour of engineering students – a gap my own research will hopefully fill!
Where next?
I am currently putting together my research plan. My aim is to recruit women undergraduates from a few UK institutions of different sizes/demographics, and interview them.
If any engineering librarian reading this thinks they would be interested in getting involved with this research, I would love to speak to you! I may need help finding the right people to target in different institutions, so if you think that’s something you may be able to help with, please do get in touch. Feel free to comment here, or email me.
References
Baer, W., & Li, L. (2009). Library and information use patterns by engineering faculty and students. ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Austin, Texas. https://peer.asee.org/4724
Davis, R. (2023). “My second home”: Why undergraduate women in STEM use academic libraries. portal: Libraries and the Academy, 23(1), 197-214. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2023.0003
Dera, J., Borgaonkar, A. D., Scharf, D., & Sodhi, J. (2020). Promoting engineering research early: A case study of research question formulation in a first-year engineering course. ASEE Annual Conference, Virtual. https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2–35103
Dommermuth, E., & Roberts, L. (2022). Listening to first generation college students in engineering: Implications for libraries and information literacy. Communications in Information Literacy, 16(2). https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2022.16.2.2
Douglas, K. A., Epps, A. V., Mihalec-Adkins, B., Fosmire, M., & Purzer, Ş. (2015). A comparison of beginning and advanced engineering students’ description of information skills. Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, 10(2), 127-143. https://doi.org/10.18438/B8TK5Z
Douglas, K. A., Rohan, C., Fosmire, M., Smith, C., Epps, A. V., & Purzer, S. (2014). “I just Google It”: A qualitative study of information strategies in problem solving used by upper and lower level engineering students. IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), Madrid, Spain. https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE.2014.7044298
Douglas, K. A., Wertz, R. E. H., Fosmire, M., Purzer, S., & Van Epps, A. S. (2014). First-year and junior engineering students’ self-assessment of information literacy skills. ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Indianapolis, IN. https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2–20498
Fosmire, M., & Radcliffe, D. (Eds.). (2014). Integrating information into the engineering design process. Purdue University Press. https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/35597.
Gowri, P., & Padma, P. (2018). SCONUL Seven Pillars model to test the information literacy skills of engineering students: A case study. Library Philosophy and Practice. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/1996/
Hagiwara, Y., Ishita, E., Watanabe, Y., & Tomiura, Y. (2022). Identifying scholarly search skills based on resource and document selection behavior among researchers and Master’s students in engineering. College & Research Libraries, 83(4). https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.83.4.610
Hsieh, C., & Knight, L. (2008). Problem-based learning for engineering students: an evidence-based comparative study. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 34(1), 25-30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2007.11.007
Kaufman, J., Tenopir, C., & Christian, L. (2019). Does workplace matter? How engineers use and access information resources in academic and non-academic settings. Science & Technology Libraries, 38(3), 288-308. https://doi.org/10.1080/0194262x.2019.1637806
Leckie, G. J., & Fullerton, A. (1999). Information literacy in science and engineering undergraduate education: Faculty attitudes and pedagogical practices. College & Research Libraries, 60(1), 9-29. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.60.1.9
Leiss, C., & Ludwig, P. (2018). Engineering graduates at work: Reality check for information literacy. IATUL Annual Conference Proceedings, 1-10. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/iatul/2018/infolit/3/
Liu, T.-T., & Sun, H.-B. (2012). Gender differences on information literacy of science and engineering undergraduates. International Journal of Modern Education and Computer Science, 4(2), 23-30. https://doi.org/10.5815/ijmecs.2012.02.04
Lovett, M. D., Burrell, S. T., & Flowers, L. O. (2016). Fusing information literacy skills in STEM courses. Journal of Education & Social Policy, 3(3), 7-11. https://www.jespnet.com/journal/index/2296
Makhafola, L., & Van Deventer, M. J. (2020). Selecting information products and services to embed in a virtual learning environment to support engineering undergraduates in a blended learning context. Library Management, 41(6/7), 579-591. https://doi.org/10.1108/LM-04-2020-0061
Mercer, K., Weaver, K., & Stables-Kennedy, A. (2019). Understanding undergraduate engineering student information access and needs: Results from a scoping review. In ASEE 126th Annual Conference. American Society for Engineering Education. https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/handle/10012/14781
Phillips, M., Fosmire, M., Turner, L., Petersheim, K., & Lu, J. (2019). Comparing the information needs and experiences of undergraduate students and practicing engineers. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 45(1), 39–49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2018.12.004
Phillips, M., Van Epps, A., Johnson, N., & Zwicky, D. (2018). Effective engineering information literacy instruction: A systematic literature review. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 44(6), 705-711. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2018.10.006
Robinson, M. A. (2010). An empirical analysis of engineers’ information behaviors. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(4), 640-658. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21290
Talikka, M., Soukka, R., & Eskelinen, H. (2018). Effects of brief integrated information literacy education sessions on undergraduate engineering students’ interdisciplinary research. The New Review of Academic Librarianship, 24(1), 48-62. https://doi.org/10.1080/13614533.2017.1365735
Tran, C. Y., Miller, C.-A., & Aveni, D. (2018). Baseline assessment: Understanding WISE freshman students’ information literacy skills in a one-shot library session. Science & Technology Libraries, 37(3), 302-321. https://doi.org/10.1080/0194262X.2018.1460651
Ward, L., & Kim, M. (2019). Faculty perception of information literacy at Queensborough Community College. Community & Junior College Libraries, 23(1-2), 13-27. https://doi.org/10.1080/02763915.2018.1558899
Waters, N., Kasuto, E., & McNaughton, F. (2012). Partnership between engineering libraries: identifying information literacy skills for a successful transition from student to professional. Science & Technology Libraries, 31(1), 124-132. https://doi.org/10.1080/0194262x.2012.648104
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