The influence of information use strategies on ill structured-domain graduate learning tasks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation presents a user-centred, interdisciplinary study on information use strategies. In complex learning contexts such as ill-structured-domains, there are three ways of using information. The first is to make sense of the information fragments to construct a cohesive whole. The second is to integrate this newly constructed whole into the learner's existing knowledge structures. The third is to make use of this integrated entity to achieve the learning goals. The Information Science literature refers to this three-fold process as "using information". A number of strategies can be applied to using information in order to help learners address the challenges of using information within these complex contexts. This dissertation study is a qualitative inquiry on the influence such strategies can have on using information to complete ill-structured-domain learning tasks.This was a naturalistic study designed to better understand both the general nature of the information use process and the influence of strategies on this process. The study consisted of a user-centred study that examined the information use process of nine graduate students enrolled in the faculty of Education at McGill University over the period of an academic semester. This investigation focused on two graduate level ill-structured-domain learning tasks. The first was to produce a set of reflective critiques on the required course readings over the course of the term, one for each theory studied. The second task was a final term paper that proposed research based on the theories studied in the course. Learners were required to synthesize the theories and the course content in order to propose a research study relevant to the field of Education. Both tasks required the use of higher order thinking skills. The information use strategies used by students during these two tasks were studied in order to better understand their nature and thus make an original contribution towards theory and practice in the Information Science. The two frameworks developed by this study represent theoretical contributions. The first framework provides an overview of the information use process in an ill-structured-domain learning task. The second framework demonstrates the influence of strategies on this process. These two frameworks could be used as springboards for future Information Science research.These frameworks could also be used to design instructional programs in such a way as to improve student performance. This represents a contribution to professional practice. The user-centered approach provides insights on factoring in user subjectivity into these programs. The framework for information use strategies can help inform learners on how to construct dynamic and optimal strategies and plans that are best adapted to their learning goals and to the progressive stages of using information.A number of interdisciplinary propositions guided this investigation. The investigation of the information use process was predominantly guided by Dervin's (1983) âsensemaking approachâ and Spiro's (1987) "cognitive flexibility theory". The analysis of strategies in the information use process relied mostly on the Education literature and employed Pressley's (1989) "strategy oriented perspective" as the key theoretical concept.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".