Collaborative information behaviour of engineering students in a senior design group project: A pilot study

Abstract

This paper presents a pilot study of an ongoing research conducted by an Engineering Librarian investigating the collaborative information behaviour of undergraduate engineering students who are working on a course-based engineering project. The research aims to understand how students collaboratively identify their information needs and then seek and use information sources from different channels as a group. The study plans to analyse the interaction of the project as the learning with learners' information-related activities as students try to identify their information needs, seek information, and then use information for their project during a group-based course. The paper represents the first case study where data were collected through a web-based survey at the end of a senior multidisciplinary design engineering course along with a preliminary descriptive analysis of the collected data that are related to the practice of both academic engineering librarians and engineering educators who are involved in these courses. © 2011 American Society for Engineering Education.