Exploration of students’ information behaviour and experience of assignment completion process

Abstract

Assignments play an important role in consolidating knowledge for university students. Understanding students’ information behaviour and experience in this type of work task, i.e., students’ assignments, would be beneficial to the design of learning platforms or search systems to better support effective and efficient information behaviours. A 37-day online observation of 14 university students in China, working on one assignment through client logging, combined with questionnaires and interviews were conducted in this study. This study used descriptive analysis to describe students’ information behaviours and experiences during the assignment completion processes at different stages. According to the proportion of efforts devoted to seeking information and working for the assignment in four evenly distributed periods, the students could be divided into four time-allocation types, namely 'Ninjas', 'Turtles', 'Time wasters' and 'Pursuers'. Different types of students had different information behaviours and experiences during assignment completion process. When applying Information Seeking Process model to analysis students’ information behaviours for the assignment completion, it is necessary to combine the time context and examine how each time allocation type of students would allocate their information seeking effort in task completion behaviours.