Client: Jan Wallace, Head, David Lam Library
Background
Common tasks that most university students repeatedly encounter are research projects. Professors often assign essays, cases, and presentations for students to complete, demanding valid scientific sources to back claims. It is initially very daunting to find specific information on the internet, as there is near an infinite amount of data available. As a result, librarians try to teach information literacy—information fluency—which is the ability to choose and formulate a research strategy. Information fluency includes formulating the critical questions to be asked, considering who might provide the information needed, and finding the information required.
The Student Experience Research Advisory (SERA) will be investigating the library instructional services that are offered by the David Lam library. More specifically, we are interested in finding out what students think about the library instructional presentations, and their suggestions for improvement.
Method
SERA has decided to use the survey research method, via online questionnaire or printed questionnaire, to gather data on the David Lam library instructional services. The survey method was chosen because it excels at quantifying past information, avoids many reliability problems through standardization, can cover a wide range of information, and has the flexibility to include open-ended questions. It is also able to efficiently gather and quantify information. For this project, any other approach would require that researchers talk face-to-face with participants. The fact that some students may have not attended instructional classes makes any qualitative approach unproductive and costly. For example, if a participant answers “no” to “have you attended a library instruction class,” the set of questions that follow are essentially meaningless for this individual.
The sample will consist of second, third, and fourth year BCom students. First year students are excluded because they do not have much, if any, experience doing research for university projects, or have attended informational classes by the time the survey is conducted.
Optional: If possible, surveys can be handed out right after library instructional presentations. This will give students an opportunity to reflect on their experience right away. The disadvantage to this approach lies in its time consuming nature.
Resources
Incentives are to be decided upon.