Search results

This study was designed to explore the library and information science research on international students and information literacy published between 1990 and 2014.

Systematic review was used to identify and analyze publications from a 25-year period. Three major library information science (LIS) databases were searched for publications meeting the study criteria, and then manual bibliography searches were performed on all those included.

Twenty-one of the 23 included publications were papers published in scholarly journals. There was a slight growth in number of publications by year between 1990 and 2014. Most of the research was conducted in the USA, Australia or Canada. Surveys and interviews were the most commonly used research methods, and nine of the studies used mixed methods. “Library experience” and “information seeking” emerged as the most common research topics. Key findings presented in these papers were often related to library and non-library resources, library instruction, language issues and research difficulties experienced by international students. Author recommendations were generally related to campus collaboration, staff training, assessment, cultural awareness and library instruction.

The findings of this study will be of value for LIS practitioners who wish to develop or improve information literacy training for the international student populations on their campuses.

Systematic review is a useful and rigorous method that can be of value in LIS research. This paper provides a thorough review and assessment of the original research related to international students and information literacy, and summarizes the resulting recommendations.

The average American child spends more time “playing”¹ than doing any other activity besides sleeping and attending school (watching television comes in next, with children gradually replacing play time with TV time as they grow older) (Hofferth & Sandberg, 2001a, b). In fact, free, unstructured time makes up between 20 and 50% of children’s waking hours² (Hofferth & Sandberg, 2001a, b; Larson & Richards, 1989). Nonetheless, sociologists currently know very little about how children’s free time use influences their well-being. Although scholars, teachers, and parents all have strong opinions about the types of free-time activities that they think are “best” for children, recent studies of the association between children’s time use and their well-being have failed to find consistent associations (Hofferth & Sandberg, 2001a, b; McHale, Crouter & Tucker, 2001).

Both accounting professionals and accounting academics have noted the importance of communication skills for the career success of students. Further, the general consensus from the academic and practitioner literature is that these communication skills are an area in which many students could use improvement. One factor that has been shown to impact the improvement and development of these skills is communication apprehension.

In this chapter, we describe a combination of pedagogical methods we employed in tax classes at two universities to reduce written communication apprehension among students. More specifically, we draw ideas from communications research which suggest that increased writing opportunities, progressively increasing the weighting of the assignments, using models and examples for study and comparison, and trying to make feedback more effective may help to reduce written communication apprehension. We implemented this suggested approach by using a series of assignments that incorporated writing components.

Results suggest that writing apprehension reduced from the beginning of the semester to the end of the semester. Further, the reduction in writing apprehension was even greater for those students who began the semester with high written communication apprehension. In addition, the results of the survey questions at the end of the semester suggest that the methods also improved students’ confidence in preparing tax-related written communication.

This paper aims to report findings from an exploratory study investigating the web interactions and technoliteracy of children in the early childhood years. Previous research has studied aspects of older children's technoliteracy and web searching; however, few studies have analyzed web search data from children younger than six years of age.

The study explored the Google web searching and technoliteracy of young children who are enrolled in a “preparatory classroom” or kindergarten (the year before young children begin compulsory schooling in Queensland, Australia). Young children were video‐ and audio‐taped while conducting Google web searches in the classroom. The data were qualitatively analysed to understand the young children's web search behaviour.

The findings show that young children engage in complex web searches, including keyword searching and browsing, query formulation and reformulation, relevance judgments, successive searches, information multitasking and collaborative behaviours. The study results provide significant initial insights into young children's web searching and technoliteracy.

The use of web search engines by young children is an important research area with implications for educators and web technologies developers.

This is the first study of young children's interaction with a web search engine.

The logic of consequences and the logic of appropriateness have long been central to understanding behavior in organizations. However, scholarly work on the logic of appropriateness has consisted mostly of conceptual clarification and ex post explanation of observed behavior. In an effort to facilitate the study of the logic of appropriateness through experimental methods, this paper introduces an experimental paradigm that allows for the manipulation of decision logic as an independent variable. Using this paradigm, 710 participants played four iconic behavioral games in which profitability and ethics are both at play and, sometimes, at odds: Prisoners’ Dilemma, Dictator Game, Ultimatum Game, and Trust Game. The manipulation generated behavioral data, as well as qualitative data about participants’ considerations while deciding according to each logic. The behavioral data show that, compared to participants employing a logic of consequences, participants employing a logic of appropriateness rejected more unfair offers in an Ultimatum Game and were more generous when reciprocating trusting behavior in a Trust Game. In all other cases, behavior between the two logics was not significantly different. An analysis of the qualitative data suggests that a logic of consequences increased participants’ focus on monetary concerns, whereas a logic of appropriateness increased participants’ focus on moral concerns. Taken together, these data provide new insights into when, how, and why the two logics result in behavioral and cognitive differences. The authors conclude by considering directions for future research that they see as particularly amenable to study using the experimental manipulation presented here.

This paper aims to identify content strategies on social media that influence engagement and to analyze those operations to describe important features for co-creation and trust.

This paper addresses the question of how social media content can influence engagement by using a medium-sized Swedish company for an empirical case study. This empirical study is based on a participatory action research methodology. By using the company account on LinkedIn, the authors experimented with relational content to understand the effects on customer-perceived value and trust.

Results reveal that action-oriented messages had a more significant impact on engagement than product-oriented messages and value-based messages.

This paper builds on the existing literature in two ways: drawing upon business-to-business relationships and perceived value and using recent advances in the use of social networking sites to understand the value of co-creation through a participatory culture.

A customer’s visit to a retail website is a critical “moment of truth” during which contemporary retailers attempt to simultaneously, during a single web navigation, capture customers’ attention, build rapport, and prompt them to act. By showing how to capture customer commitment over the course of a single website visit, the concept of customer website engagement, defined as “the process of developing cognitive, affective and behavioural commitment to an active relationship with the website”, addresses strategic concerns. Drawing from literature on engagement, the purpose of this paper is to consider how retail websites can engage customers during the course of a website navigation. A conceptual model of website customer engagement underpinned by relationship marketing and communication knowledge, shows how perceptions of the website’s exploration and sense-making potential can activate consumer engagement, and is then empirically tested.

Using survey data, measures of the four dimensions of engagement (interaction engagement, activity engagement, behavioural engagement, and communication engagement) and of three drivers are developed and validated. The model is tested empirically (n=301) using structural equation modelling.

The results support the process conceptualisation of engagement, which identifies organismic as well as conative stages, and show the distinct roles played by perceptions of informational exploration, experiential exploration and sense-making in activating engagement.

The study provides online retailing practice with an organising framework enabling online retailing managers to consider how, depending on their product category and their size, they might (re)design their website to optimally produce customer engagement.

The study contributes to online marketing and retailing knowledge by showing the relevance of the concept of engagement as it pertains to customers’ single navigations on retail websites, and by empirically showing, through a parsimonious model, how engagement can be activated and unfold.

This chapter explores new and emerging dimensions in our understanding of how information behaviour develops in early childhood. Spink (2010) proposed that information behaviour — when we engage in behaviours to make sense of, seek, avoid, forage, use and organise information — is (1) shaped by both instinctive and environmental dimensions that are as essential to the lives of our prehistoric ancestors as they are for people today and (2) emerges in early childhood. This chapter explores what we currently know about the development of cognitive, language, social and information behaviour abilities in early childhood. Drawing on research from cognitive and developmental psychology, and findings from two studies of different aspects of young children's information behaviours, including Web searching (Spink, et al., 2010) and library information categorisation (Cooper, 2004), the chapter discusses information behaviour development in early childhood. The connection between general cognitive development and information behaviour are discussed, and further research suggested.

Web search services are now a major source of information for a growing number of people. We need to know more about how users search Web search engines to improve the effectiveness of their information retrieval. This paper reports results from a major study exploring users’ information searching behavior on the EXCITE Web search engine. The study is the first to investigate Web users’ successive searching behavior as they conduct related searches