This study aims to investigate patterns of information use among undergraduate engineers as they progress through their academic programs. The primary objective was to discern how…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to investigate patterns of information use among undergraduate engineers as they progress through their academic programs. The primary objective was to discern how second and fourth-year students differ in their use of different types of information while performing specific tasks, namely, conducting labs, composing reports and undertaking projects.
Design/methodology/approach
The research used an online questionnaire to collect data, focusing on the comparative analysis of second and fourth-year engineering students’ information use. The analytical framework comprised a chi-square test, residual analysis and exploratory data analysis, for evaluating statistical significance and identifying trends over time.
Findings
The results demonstrated a statistically significant difference in information use between second and fourth year undergraduates. Notably, fourth year students exhibited a preference for disciplinary genres, such as journal articles, patents and technical reports. This coincided with a decline in fourth year students’ use of educational genres, including textbooks and instructors’ handouts, notes and slides. These shifts in information use were observed consistently across all three tasks.
Originality/value
The uniqueness of the study resides in its innovative approach to exploring information use by investigating the relationship between genres and tasks over the course of students’ academic programs. The research introduces a novel approach for visualizing changes in information use. By describing the evolving preferences of undergraduate students from novice to emerging professional, this study contributes valuable insights into the nuanced ways in which information is used throughout the levels of engineering education.
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Keywords
This paper explores the information needs and behaviors of undergraduate engineers.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper explores the information needs and behaviors of undergraduate engineers.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper reports on a qualitative study employing semi-structured interviews with 18 students.
Findings
The study identified the types of information needs undergraduate engineers encounter while working on problem solving tasks and the strategies they use to resolve these needs. The findings reveal that students often encounter difficulties due to a lack of procedural knowledge rather than conceptual gaps or misunderstandings. Students look for step-by-step solutions to address their information needs and become more efficient problem-solvers. However, most instructors do not provide answers or solutions, leaving students uncertain about their progress and unable to correct their mistakes. Consequently, students seek information from their peers, including step-by-step solutions and access to previous course materials. They use file-sharing and instant messaging platforms like Google Drive and Facebook Messenger as covert means of seeking help, sharing solutions and engaging in coursework-related discussions.
Originality/value
The findings enrich the theory of information needs by delineating between conceptual and procedural information needs. These findings also underscore the significant role that classmates and friends play as sources of information. The study offers implications for conceptual development of information needs, and for instructors to provide solutions and support sharing between peers on official platforms.
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Samuel Dodson, Ido Roll, Negar M. Harandi, Sidney Fels and Dongwook Yoon
Students in flipped classrooms are challenged to orchestrate an increasingly heterogeneous collection of learning objects, including audiovisual materials as well as traditional…
Abstract
Purpose
Students in flipped classrooms are challenged to orchestrate an increasingly heterogeneous collection of learning objects, including audiovisual materials as well as traditional learning objects, such as textbooks and syllabi. This study aims to examine students' information practices interacting with and synthesizing across learning objects, technologies and people in flipped classrooms.
Design/methodology/approach
This grounded theory study explores the information practices of 12 undergraduate engineering students as they learned in two flipped classrooms. An artifact walkthrough was used to elicit descriptions of how students conceptualize and work around interoperability problems between the diverse and distributed learning objects by weaving them together into information tapestries.
Findings
Students maintained a notebook as an information tapestry, weaving fragmented information snippets from the available learning objects, including, but not limited to, instructional videos and textbooks. Students also connected with peers on Facebook, a back-channel that allowed them to sidestep the academic honesty policy of the course discussion forum, when collaborating on homework assignments.
Originality/value
The importance of the interoperability of tools with elements of students' information space and the significance of designing for existing information practices are two outcomes of the grounded theory approach. Design implications for educational technology including the weaving of mixed media and the establishment of spaces for student-to-student interaction are also discussed.
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Padraig Timothy McCarthy, Chris O'Riordan and Ray Griffin
– The purpose of this paper is to focus on the other end of entrepreneurship – the disassembling of enterprises by insolvency professionals.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to focus on the other end of entrepreneurship – the disassembling of enterprises by insolvency professionals.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing on empirical material from major insolvency practitioners (IPs) in Ireland; the paper identifies three different narrative positions – “clinical market operators”, “blame the entrepreneurs” and “professional detachment/disidentification” – that these specialists employed to story their working experiences.
Findings
The paper suggests that IPs do not have a fixed narrative schema to narrate their professional identities, as they struggle to reconcile their professional acts with their personal ambitions. These findings point to a disconnection between the political rhetoric on risk taking and the acts perpetrated on entrepreneurs who fail, a central tension in the discourse on entrepreneurship policy.
Research limitations/implications
The paper adds to the current debate on business failure, an area that is typically under-researched and under-theorised in entrepreneurship studies. By offering a response to calls for more multi-perspective research, this paper makes a significant contribution to extant interpretive literature on business failure. While the method of analysing stories is widely accepted in social science research, researchers seeking to replicate this study may produce different results; this is a taken for granted outcome of the method.
Practical implications
The analysis suggests that the current legislative impetus to ameliorate the implications of insolvency, driven by an aspiration to encourage second-chance entrepreneurship, faces resistance from IPs as they attempt to fulfil their professional obligations. In the absence of legislative reform, the impulse, perhaps even process necessity, of IPs to dialogically position themselves against failed entrepreneurs is likely to continue.
Originality/value
The paper's originality and value arise from its unique consideration of other end of entrepreneurship; offering novel insights into the difficulties IPs have in narrating their working lives.
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Bonnie J. Tulloch, Michelle Kaczmarek, Saguna Shankar and Lisa P. Nathan
This project set out to explore information scholars’ perceptions of the influence of their keyword selections and the implications of their linguistic choices on possibilities…
Abstract
Purpose
This project set out to explore information scholars’ perceptions of the influence of their keyword selections and the implications of their linguistic choices on possibilities for and perceptions of the field of Information Science. We trialed a narrative methodological approach to investigate the multiple stories told with specific keywords, how they relate to larger discourses within the field and the impact they have on the lives of information researchers.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper draws on Arthur Frank’s narrative analysis to consider keywords as stories, which shape one’s sense of professional identity and belonging. The analysis, which is informed by insights from multi-disciplinary scholars of keywords, employs data from a keywords-oriented workshop with Information School faculty and students, as well as an online questionnaire sent to heads of Information Schools.
Findings
We did not find a singular definitive story of information science scholars’ experiences with keywords. Rather we identify tensions surrounding common and contested understandings of discipline, canon and information, engaging the complexity of interdisciplinary, international, intellectual and moral claims of the field. This research offers insight into the experiential factors that shape scholars’ engagement with keywords and the tensions they can create.
Originality/value
A wealth of bibliometric analyses of keywords focuses on finding the “right” words to describe the scholarship you seek or the work you want others to discover. However, this study offers information researchers a novel approach, creating space to acknowledge the generative tensions of keywords, beyond the extractive logic of search and retrieval.
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Keywords
The following is an annotated list of materials that discuss the ways in which librarians can provide library users with orientation to facilities and services, and instruct them…
Abstract
The following is an annotated list of materials that discuss the ways in which librarians can provide library users with orientation to facilities and services, and instruct them in library information and computer skills. This is RSR's 11th annual review of this literature, and covers publications from 1984. A few items from 1983 have been included because of their significance, and because they were not available for review last year. Several items were not annotated because the compiler was unable to secure them.
The Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act sets new whistleblowing standards for internal accountants and external auditors who fail to resolve differences internally with top management…
Abstract
The Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act sets new whistleblowing standards for internal accountants and external auditors who fail to resolve differences internally with top management on financial reporting matters. Whistleblowers are eligible to receive a financial reward under Dodd-Frank if they “voluntarily” provide “original” information and meet other criteria. Interpretation 102-4 of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants Code establishes reporting obligations for external auditors to meet the requirements of Dodd-Frank. The purpose of this paper is to critically evaluate the standards to better understand the whistleblowing process. A review of the literature identifies areas of concern in deciding whether to blow the whistle. The paper contributes to the literature by integrating thoughts, ideas, and issues raised by prior researchers and considerations specific to the whistleblowing process. The analysis results in the proposal of specific unanswered questions about the process that can guide future researchers.
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In an able article upon Sir WILLIAM MCCORMICK's Report on five years' work of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. The Daily Telegraph observes that “five years…
Abstract
In an able article upon Sir WILLIAM MCCORMICK's Report on five years' work of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. The Daily Telegraph observes that “five years ago, when a twelvemonth of the war had compelled us to realise that winning it would be the hardest task ever laid upon the nation, a beginning was made with organised encouragement and assistance of research by the State. It had long been realised only too well by scientific workers that Great Britain was singular among the leading civilised countries in its obstinate neglect of this vital interest of a modern State; and the course of the war very rapidly brought all of us, and not only the savants, to a recognition of the fact that our principal enemy was foremost of all the Powers in the care which it had given to that interest. The army of technical experts mobilised by Germany for the scientific war was far larger and better equipped than our own. In setting‐out to remedy this state of things, the Government was looking, necessarily, far ahead of the war, which was likely to be ended one way or another long before the benefits of a Department of Scientific and Industrial Research could begin to materialise. Now, five years after the inception of the scheme by the Committee of the Privy Council, it is beginning to bear fruit; but the real harvest is in the not immediate future still. Sir WILLIAM MCCORMICK'S Report, however, as summarised yesterday in our columns, shows in its review of those five years’ work how well the foundations have been laid, and how excellent are the prospects of useful development along the lines now clearly marked out for the activity of the Department. Backwardness in the application of scientific research to industry has cost us dear in many ways. It is a reproach which is now in a fair way to be lifted from us altogether, thanks to that general awakening of the national intelligence of which the new Department was only one result; for its work would be of little avail without the active co‐operation of the industrial world. That is, as the Report brings clearly out, being given; and it will be given in increasing measure as time reveals the inestimable value of what can be done by combined enterprise, directed and fostered by the State. This is only one branch of the Department's work; but it is in this connection, perhaps, that the practical utility of it will be most generally appreciated. Eighteen associations of industrial firms have now been established, each association undertaking co‐operative scientific investigation of the problems of its particular industry; five more are about to be set up and to receive their licenses from the Board of Trade. Ten of the associations are actually at work, and the 2,300 firms organised in them have raised, in the first year, an aggregate income of nearly £40,000 to add to the contribution made by the Department out of the million fund granted by Parliament for the encouragement of such associations. That this expenditure on co‐operative research will be returned many limes over is not open to doubt; the value of it is written on every page of the history of Germany's colossal industrial development in the decades before the war, and it is, indeed, in great part the explanation of that development.
The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which Benjamin Franklin's understanding of political economy was shaped by his association with the French school of writers…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which Benjamin Franklin's understanding of political economy was shaped by his association with the French school of writers known as physiocrats.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper works from direct statements by Franklin in his published works and correspondence and biographical sources.
Findings
Franklin declared himself to embrace physiocratic principles and ideals but was not able to advance these ideals at home.
Research limitations/implications
Further details are undoubtedly available from sources not translated from French into English.
Practical implications
The course of history would have been significantly different had the physiocratic ideals become the basis for law and public policies.
Originality/value
The paper offers further evidence of the influence of the physiocratic school on Franklin, as one of the leading practical philosophers of his age.