Information Is Experimental: A Qualitative Study of Students’ Chemical Information Literacy in a Problem-Based Beginner Laboratory

Abstract

The focus in teaching and research is shifting from a traditional perspective of information literacy (IL) as a specific set of general, mostly text-based skills to a more comprehensive understanding of the complex aspects that constitute IL as an ongoing, context-specific process. However, there is a need for further insight into the social and contextual dimension of the information process. The inherent connection between problem-based learning (PBL) and IL holds great potential for a better understanding of students’ information experience. The aim of this study was to describe the contextual and social aspects of the information process students engage in during a PBL beginner’s lab and how this practical experience can be utilized for teaching. To this end, a wide range of qualitative data were collected over the course of three cohorts, including interviews, on-site audio recordings, and documents. Results suggest that students first evaluate the information they retrieve in terms of experimental safety, feasibility, and usefulness in planning the experimental procedure. Then, the experiment provides the crucial information about whether the previously acquired information was useful for solving the problem. The experiment is at the center of the student information process in a PBL lab. In this work, we discuss how to organize IL instruction from the student perspective and thus place the experiment at the center of IL instruction in a PBL lab. The results of this work contribute to an expanded understanding of IL that is useful for teaching and research in chemistry education.

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