Does IL Education Have an Impact on Undergraduate Engineering Students' Research Skills

Abstract

This paper presents the first results of testing a model of studying the change in undergraduate students’ research skills after receiving information literacy (IL) instruction. The model is tested with a group of Master’s level engineering students attending a construction materials’ seminar. The IL instruction consists of presenting the basics of information searching in general, the basics of bibliometrics, and searching guidelines of the most important databases in the field of mechanical engineering and material science. After the lecture, the students attend an instructed hands-on information retrieval training session. In order to enable information retrieval from the most important non-English sources, the students attend tailored French or German language education according to their choice. To determine whether information literacy education can be used as a means of improving the technological university undergraduate students’ research skills, special attention is paid on the students’ ability to describe their research problems and to formulate the research questions in their final papers. Moreover, the scientific value and versatility of the source literature are observed. The research methodology for evaluating the model is based on classical qualitative analysis.

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