Enhancing the undergraduate engineering students' research skills

In universities, the faculties expect students to write their papers in an academic way and to use high quality scientific information sources. However, especially undergraduate students do not always know how to write academic papers nor do they know how to rate and evaluate the information. Moreover, the students' searching skills are often insufficient and they need additional support in information retrieval.Information literacy (IL) is determined as a university student's essential and basic ability to find, use, and evaluate the source material used in various assignments. In many universities, the library personnel teach information searching while the faculty is responsible for the research education. Unfortunately, too often these courses are taught separately and sometimes they are not taught at all. Yet, the benefits of cooperation between the faculties and the library are evident. This paper describes how both the faculty and the library can benefit from cooperation if they join their forces to teach the students research skills. In our case, IL education and foreign language teaching are integrated into the curriculum of a constructionmaterials' seminar. The faculty, the language center, and the library cooperate closely in planning the education. The students are motivated to learn German, French, and English as well as information retrieval skills when it is related to their current course. Scientific working methods can also be more easily introduced to the students when they see the connection between the attainment to find high quality information sources and the ability to do research. Two concrete research topics are discussed and utilized as case examples in this paper: one is dealing with information search of ceramic microwave applications and the other is focused to finding relevant scientific information about sustainability aspects of polymers used in car industry. In both of these cases either German or French can be used as a supporting language in addition toEnglish based keyword selection. Special attention is paid on the novelty value of the information. In these cases it is also necessary to discuss about the weight between scientific and commercial references. The aspects of looking objectively for the information also from businessoriented databases become important. We generalize the results gain from case examples to the wider context of mechanical engineering. We also present a model for evaluating the change in the research skills of the undergraduate students. Key points of our observation are how the students are able to form their research problem and how they set their research question.