Part I Concepts
6.3 Improve your Learning (and Grade)
Searching for appropriate references can be both rewarding and frustrating.
However, what is probably unknown for many students is that the underpinning views you have on information seeking affect your learning.
Briefly, you can approach your information seeking activity with one of the follow- ing views:
● That the main reason for information seeking is to find facts that can be used in the thesis.
● That the main reason for information seeking is to evaluate and analyze previous work.
A major study in the field of information seeking and learning showed that those students that had a mere fact finding approach gave evidence of less qualified study results than those who perceived information seeking as a way of evaluating and analyzing a complex issue (Limberg, 2000). Thus, if you use an “evaluate and ana- lyze” approach instead of a “fact finding” approach, you might lay the foundation for a better grade for your thesis.
To evaluate and analyze a complex issue could for example mean that:
● You find information from a variety of sources that provides you with different perspectives on the topic, placing it in a wider context
● You are able to scrutinize information in such a way that you can reveal and structure underlying values and motives in information sources. This can be val- uable if you try to find out how a particular problem has been investigated or researched by others, rather than just the fact that it has been researched. To widen the perspective and also include the process that has led to these results can often be worthwhile and increase the understanding of a topic
Let us illustrate the above by a short scenario in which you take a first step towards finding information for your thesis project.
Many students would probably immediately claim that the quickest way to find information is to use search engines like Google. Search engines for the Web are very often brilliant tools for finding information, and it certainly can be a good choice for those who are looking for computer-science related information.
However, it might be problematic if one expects to find everything that is needed with help of a search engine, since researchers disseminate their research articles through the channels of scientific journals and conferences. These articles might be freely available via the Web, but very often they are not, which means that you might succeed in finding references to documents via a search engine, but you will not be able to access the actual documents. In addition, the documents you find might be drafts, and thus different from the ones that were officially published.
So, if you can not find the appropriate documents with the help of a search engine, then you should investigate the bibliographic databases that are available via the university library. These bibliographic databases are usually available via web interfaces.
Each bibliographic database contains a great number of references to various documents. These documents may have been published in various circumstances and contexts. For instance you will probably find numerous references to articles published in a wide array of different journals, but also to papers published in con- nection to different conferences; the latter will most likely be labelled as conference proceedings in the database. The problem you now have is to decide what to go for, so to speak. What is the difference between a conference paper and a journal article;
is one of them “better” than the other? Could the articles in one particular journal be of higher value than those from another journal? How do you know if a particu- lar author is highly acclaimed within this domain? And what about the authors’
affiliations; is it reasonable to believe that a paper written by an author from one particular university is of higher quality than the paper written by an author from another? To be able to answer these kinds of questions it is necessary with practice and experience.
Hopefully our little example scenario shows that it is important to pay attention to such things as the name of the journal (or the conference proceedings) the article was published in – do you have reasons to come back to this journal? – to who the author is – has he or she written more about the subject? – to the details about affiliation – could it be so that the author is a member of a research group in which other documents have been produced that perhaps can be of interest to me? (Here is a good example of when a search engine is an excellent tool, i.e. to identify and locate people). It can also be of importance to note if there is a connection between the kind of articles or papers one can find and the database in which one has found them. If one would try to label these kinds of issues that we have dealt with so far, one could use the term contextual aspects. Unfortunately contextual aspects often tend to be neglected when a novice information seeker conceptualizes information seeking.
6.3 Improve your Learning 43
Even though these contextual aspects are important it is of course essential to remember that the actual text itself is the main object of evaluation when judging the value of an article. An article written by an unknown author from a university of unknown standards could be equally as good as a n article written by a famous profile within a particular field. There are certain questions that should never be ignored: is the text logically coherent, are the arguments well grounded? Is the text methodologically sound? Are data analyzed in a relevant and correct way? Is there a reasonable correlation between results and conclusions?
The issue of information seeking is discussed in additional detail in Chap. 13.
7
Developing your Aim
To succeed with your project, you first have to define the aim of the project clearly.
This is necessary because it clarifies in your own mind exactly what it is you are aiming to achieve. It also helps you to communicate with your supervisor, your examiner and other people whom you want to talk with about your project. To keep the discussions “on track”, it is necessary that both you and the person you talk to understand precisely what the project is all about.
Furthermore, the aim is necessary in order to evaluate the usefulness of your project. If you have a clear aim, anyone to whom you present your intended project to can easily judge whether they are interested in the outcome or not.
Finally, formulating a clear statement of the aim at the beginning of your project facilitates evaluation of the outcome when you have completed it. As part of the evaluation, your examiner will check to see if you have fulfilled the aim of your project. Consequently, the activity of developing the aim at the very beginning is a way of finding out what demands your supervisor and examiner will make on a success- ful project.
Therefore, once your project proposal has been accepted, you should contact your supervisor as soon as possible, in order to discuss necessary refinements to your aim.