Abstract:

Information literacy and research skills are essential in a global knowledge economy and professional development (Davis, Evans & Hickey, 2006; Waite & Davis 2006). Such skills are increasingly seen as an integral part of teacher education (Shaw, Holbrook, Scevak, Bourke, 2008).

While it may be assumed that the acquisition of a degree would result in teachers being active researchers, this is not always true (Robertson & Blacker 2006). Cakmakci (2009) states that the ability to carry out educational research is often cited as an attribute that a teacher should possess, and that teachers benefit from carrying out education research rather than just reading about it ( van Zee,1998; Sozbiolir, 2007).

The focus of this pilot study is to explore the research process, in particular the information-seeking behaviors, of National Institute of Education (Singapore) students enrolled in an academic writing class.

Data sources include a survey given to 24 students which asked them about their thoughts, feelings and actions regarding the use of sources for their research assignment and the final drafts of their research papers which were submitted in April 2013.

Kuhlthau’s Information Search Process ( ISP) ( 1983), a constructivist task-based model of the research process will be used to analyze the surveys while the second stage of analysis will be conducted based on Swales (1990) text-analysis model. Here, papers will be examined using known strategies used by experts given that, as novices, they are likely to emulate rhetorical strategies used by experts. The rhetorical choices made by the novice writers when writing research papers will show their understanding of the research paper genre and its sub-genres (Pillai, 2012).

The findings from this pilot study will be useful to design intervention techniques (in the next phase of the study) to find out whether the teaching of information literacy skills will improve trainee teachers’ ability to select and evaluate information for a literature review in writing their research papers. This will benefit future academic writing courses as instructors of these courses will have a better understanding of how they can incorporate Information literacy instruction into their lessons.

Keywords:

Information seeking behavior, Pre-service teachers, Information Literacy.