This is merely an extension of existing practice. The student chooses an advanced topic (usually for a final year course) and researches it and writes a substantial dissertation, integrating their work into the research literature. Dissertations were researched and written before the availability on online search methods. The existence of the latter imply a few changes:
We can expect literature reviews to be more substantial and thorough.
Dissertation topics can be more varied: students can search global databases and obtain papers (funds permitting!) through Inter Library Loan on topics where Lancaster's library does not have a good supply of materials. This is a trend that has been particularly observed in the ex-Polytechnics where the rapid growth in the use of online resources (e.g. BIDS) has coincided with a substantial increase in inter-library loan requests.
This may be undertaken by students at all levels of their undergraduate careers. Its origins are in postgraduate study and the traditional end of year report of a first year PhD student.
There are numerous variants:
Groups of students undertake one of the above, with various ways of splitting the work. Possibilities include splitting by search medium (individuals search the same topic on different databases), by writing process (some search, others read and report, others collate and edit) or by subtopic: each student picks a theme within the general topic and is responsible for that theme and its integration into the overall report.
A variant on the literature review where the student is required to submit only the 20 most important / relevant items, with a brief summary of each. The report may be accompanied with justifications for the inclusion of the 20 and the criteria for excluding the near misses.
Similarly, students may be required to produce a literature review that is subject to a strict space limit as measured by number of pages (and minimum font size!) or by word count. The latter is feasible given the ability to calculate word counts on most word processors. The advantages of such an exercise are: authenticity (practitioners often have to write to strict size limits), practice of revising documents using a word processor (you can never get it the right size first time) and marking efficiency (considerable student effort is needed to write a good short document and yet this makes it faster to mark than a longer rambling essay).
Where a database includes a brief abstract of the articles, students are required to extract useful information from just reading the abstracts in order to generate a report on the state of the art in the field. This is an explicit acknowledgement of the kinds of practice we all undertake when time (or access) does not permit an immediate reading of the entire article. This exercise can usefully be accompanied by discussions of other time saving methods, and a noting of what is lost by use of these methods.
Students are given a sequence of obscure factual questions whose answers are obtainable by ingenious searching of databases. Students may be formed into teams to add a greater enjoyable competitive element to the task. The chief educational aim is to practice information searching techniques including the handling of complex queries and efficient search techniques. The nature of the questions can be geared to exercise the desired techniques, with strict time limits or speed bonuses to encourage the deployment of efficient techniques.
There are two variants:
Students are given a framework for evaluation of a Web site and either:
The evaluation criteria can be adapted from existing criteria and tailored to the specific subject. Most evaluation criteria have started from a library and information science perspective and contain examples such as:
Each discipline can then add its own spin, for example:
Modern Languages:
Marketing:
An example of a set of evaluation criteria can be found at:
Work on the development of materials for critical evaluation of web sites will continue in our 1996/7 IHE funded project, WebTeach.
This activity is run in parallel with any of the above. In addition to finding and reporting on the results of their searching activity (the product), students must also report on how they obtained those results (the process). Students should note down the various search strategies and tactics that they used and their effects, along with approximate information of the time taken for each of the stages. A useful motivation for this activity is that it attempts to show how a professional intermediary might justify their fee for obtaining information for a client. The pedagogic advantages of the activity are clear, affording opportunities for reflection by the student, and remedial guidance from the tutor or other interested parties either during or after the completion of the search. Issues of efficient search techniques can be more productively raised after a review of a particularly inefficient search account. Furthermore, it is possible to set hard problems (including ones for which the result is unknown and may not even exist), since even if the student fails to find a single relevant hit, their account can still provide evidence of an excellent attempt.