‘Journals contain facts unlike the daily mail’

Implementation of an inquiry-based learning task enabling evaluation of information sources.

Myles Jones1 & Pam McKinney2

Department of Psychology1, Centre for Inquiry-Based learning in the Arts and Social

Sciences2

The University of Sheffield

PEBBLE: Psychological Enquiry-based Learning

Overview• Background • Information literacy and group work• Tutorial Task and implementation• Opportunity for you to try the IBL task• Examples of Student work• Student and Tutor Feedback • Discussion

CILASS: Centre for Inquiry-based in the Arts and Social Sciences• 5 year programme of teaching

enhancement, impacting on 10,000 students

• £4.85M funding in total from HEFCE• Includes £2.35M capital funding• Focusing on inquiry-based learning• Core community: Faculties of Arts,

Social Sciences, Law• Development, evaluation and

research • CILASS hub located in the

Information Commons plus ‘satellite’ in Bartolome House

What is Inquiry-based Learning?• Approaches to learning that are based on a

process of self-directed inquiry or research • The stimulus for an inquiry could, be an

intriguing fieldwork problem, a complex `real-life´ case-study, or an interesting research question

• inquiry is an active, questioning and critical approach to developing knowledge

• IBL approaches include problem-based learning (PBL)

• IBL can be used as the design principle for whole modules or programmes,

• IBL could be incorporated into a traditional curriculum

Psy 101: The Past• Large numbers of

students (~300)• Didactic lectures• ‘factual knowledge’• MCQ exam and tutorials• Changes in number of

students with A-level Psychology

• Ill prepared for psychology as a discursive subject

Dinosaurus Didacticus

Psychology in the popular media

The Task

• Find BBC internet news articles and newspaper articles (Newsbank)

• Work in groups (Collaborative Inquiry)

• Find corresponding scholarly article using Web of Knowledge

• Fill in power point assessment to reflect on searching process

Collaboration with the Library

• Work with CILASS liaison librarian to establish access to online newspapers

• Create subject specific version of Information skills tutorial for Web of Knowledge

• Ensure access through module WebCT course to information skills tutorials

• Feed in research conducted for Masters dissertation by a member of Library staff to the project evaluation plan

Resources

Extract from student support documentation

BBC online Newspaper Articles• Search terms used: Child

Development, Babies development, Psychology, Development, Children, Babies.

George Thomas (undergraduate Student)

Emily Jones (Post-graduate associate tutor)

BBC online Newspaper Articles: Provide any information you wish about your articles and searches (feel free to insert additional pages!)• Breast fed children handle stress better. Among almost 9,000 children that

were bottle fed, found it harder to deal with stressful events, such as parental divorce. Swedish researchers believe close physical contact and mother-baby bonding during the first few days of life may be important factors to the development of the ability to cope well with stress.

• Research in children as young as 4 months shows a preference for certain colours. Researchers used a special camera which was initially designed to test RAF fighter pilots and their reactions, however in this case it was used to to track the babies eye movements when presented with different colours. However, a criticism of the study already discovered is that the research was only conducted on 30 babies.

• Babies are said to be able to remember music that they heard after 6 months of pregnancy, when still in their mothers womb, more than a year after birth. It was previously thought that babies could only have a memory span of around a month, however the research carried out on 11 babies which showed preference to specific pieces of music and disregard for moderately similar music.

• How would you find the original article?

• What differences are there between the newspaper and journal article?

Reflective group Power Point assessment

• Search terms used to find BBC online newspaper articles

• Reflection on nature of information found: what does this tell you about the study of Psychology?

• Search terms used for Newspaper database search

• Reflection on nature of information found

• Search strategy to find related journal article

• Did you find a corresponding scholarly article? Reflection on this search process

• Compare and contrast the information from the popular and scholarly sources: Quality, honesty, authority

• Challenges faced when doing the task

Did you find a journal article relating to your BBC news online article (if so provide any information about article)?• Yes we did. It was called “New Evidence for Infant Colour

Categories” by Anna Franklin and Ian R. L. Davies at the University of Surrey. It was one of the journals which comprised of the British Journal of Developmental Psychology 2004.

• It contained experiments carried out by both adults and infants to investigate colour preferences to “novel” (new) colours which were presented to both sets of participants after habituation had been used with a single colour.

• It was shown that contrary to popular belief, infants do posses the ability to distinguish colour categories at 4 months old and are consistent with “Bornstein's” results of a similar experiment.

• The article was in depth and detailed, presenting graphical representations of the data, as well as the statistical results.

Did you notice any differences between the BBC online news article and the journal article?There were massive differences between the BBC article and the journal. First

of all, the respective titles of both pieces of research were totally different, however similar. The BBC was titled “Babies ‘have favourite colours’” in comparison to the journal title, “New evidence for infant colour categories”. The journal itself was detailed, containing graphs and reliable statistics, none of which were mentioned in the BBC article. The journal also used several different experiments to ensure the validity of the initial experiment, of which none was mentioned in the BBC article. The BBC article also managed to miss out the fact that adults were used in the research experiment as a form of control, to allow the infants results to be compared to an adults, to see if the presence of colour categories existed in 4 month old children.

I feel that the BBC article took all the interesting and easy pieces of information from the journal article and summarised it into a readable, public format, which could describe the results in a round-about way, to keep the public updated with current infant research, without providing too much information which may cause confusion to the reader.

More Examples of student work:

Student tutorial evaluation

As a result of doing this tutorial task I feel more confident in using Library resources for

psychology

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Stronglyagree

Agree Undecided Disagree Stronglydisagree

60% agree or agree strongly

20% undecided

20% disagree or disagree strongly

Student tutorial evaluation

71% agree or agree strongly

19% undecided

10% disagree or disagree strongly

As a result of doing the activities in the tutorial task I can use the web of knowledge database

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60

Stronglyagree

Agree Undecided Disagree Stronglydisagree

Student tutorial evaluation

As a result of doing the activities in the tutorial task I feel I have the skills to evaluate information I

find

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10

20

30

40

50

60

Stronglyagree

Agree Undecided Disagree Stronglydisagree

59% agree or agree strongly

28% undecided

13% disagree or disagree strongly

Future: actually measuring information literacy

Postgraduate tutor focus group‘what worked well’• Students are already accomplished searchers, just need to transfer skills to new medium

• Unfamiliar with term ‘Information literacy’ but “it makes sense”

• Positive response to open-ended nature of the task - ability to pick topics of personal interest

• Skills students learn through this activity are “vital”

Postgraduate tutor focus group‘potential for development’• Some difficulties in getting students to engage

with collaborative work

• “Both the [news] articles they picked had no original article……they got quite upset and thought they were going to get marked down for that”

• More helpful to model the full process of the task

before students start searching for news articles

Postgraduate tutor focus group‘overall’• Positive learning experience for both

undergraduate and post-graduate students.

• Range of teaching methods• Greater interaction and even linking

teaching and research by finding novel research articles of interest.

Reflections

• Large number of tutors and students

• Difficult to manage

• Difficult to know if reported problems are general or only affecting a small number of students

AcknowledgementsSandra Turkington (Sheffield; Library)

Clare Scott (Sheffield; Library)

Angela Newton (Leeds; Library)

Dr Amanda Harrison (Leeds; Psychology)

Dr Jon May (Sheffield; Psychology)

Dr Richard Rowe (Sheffield; Psychology)

Dr Jackie Andrade (Sheffield; Psychology)

We welcome comments, observations and discussion

PEBBLE: Psychological Enquiry-based Learning