#LILAC22 Perceptions of the “find it out yourself” method: developing self-efficacy and students as tourists in academic communities of practice

 Pam McKinney here live blogging from the lilac conference. This session is led by Heather Lincoln and Tiffany Chiu from the Imperial College London, and reports on research that took place as part of an Masters in Education. Heather mainly supports business students, and the university has an information literacy community of practice. Heather was keen to understand students’ experiences of IL learning, as there is limited literature on how business students develop IL and integrate it in their course more widely from the context of a one-shot IL teaching session. This was a qualitative research project, using 6 focus groups with masters students in the business school. Heather undertook thematic analysis of the data, grouped the codes into key themes. Three of these themes were presented today. The first was IL learning and self-efficacy. Students spoke about the diversity of their prior educational experiences, and the fact that they don’t know what they don’t know. They have a focus on assessment, and around passing their course. In the second theme, the find it out yourself method Students recalled their induction sessions, but not their subsequent IL teaching. There is a deficit model of education where the environment is “supposed” to be challenging, and students don’t feel like they can ask for help. Students thought that the stand-alone sessions were sufficient, and they tended to deprioritise learning outside the core curriculum due to time pressures. Also, low attendance at the sessions signalled that the sessions weren’t important.

 Engagement in Communities of practice starts with legitimate peripheral participation (Lave and Wenger). Tourists in CoPs are identified as having low levels of participation, and only engage in a superficial way. Students were appreciative of the vast range of resources available, but actually this didn’t translate into wide use of those resources, linked to the notion that information resources are significant artefacts in the  CoP. Students weren’t willing to commit the time needed to learn how to use resources.  The library has Bloomberg terminals, which is a resource that is widely used in the business context, and this is a “boundary object”, but still few students gained proficiency in searching it. Some students were very anxious about plagiarism, but others weren’t bothered at all. Avoiding plagiarism is part of the academic community of practice.