Using design journals to uncover information literacy habits of first-year students

Students engaged in a design process need to diagnose their information needs, gather resources, evaluate their quality and apply them appropriate to make evidence-based decisions about potential solutions to their problems. Much of students' information management process typically is hidden from instructors, which makes evaluation of their underlying information literacy skills difficult. In a first-year engineering technology Introduction to Design Thinking course, the instructors introduced a design journal requirement to help students capture their path through the design process and manage the knowledge they acquired and utilized during their final project. The design journal can also be used by instructors to monitor students' progress and thought processes as they work through their project. In particular, when attempting to identify students' information literacy skills in the context of engineering design, the design journal can shed some light on students' processes. Utilizing the InfoSEAD protocol for analyzing technical documentation, the authors sought to characterize the level of information literacy skills demonstrated by students through an analysis of structured design journals assigned by the course instructors. Preliminary results indicate that the design journals provide a robust window into students' thought processes as well as the quality and quantity of information gathered in the design process, how proficiently that information was used in the development of potential solutions, and whether the information gathered and utilized was documented in the students' final reports.