Experiences of Informed Learning in the Undergraduate Classroom

Introduction This chapter discusses using phenomenography to study information experience. Emphasizing the experiential nature of learning, Marton, Runesson, and Tsui (2004, p. 5) made the statement, " Powerful ways of acting spring from powerful ways of seeing. " This deceptively simple statement argues for the need for research that reveals the experiences (ways of seeing) of learners. It suggests that our abilities to perform in any number of ways, scholastically, professionally, etc., are informed by how we experience that which we are trying to achieve. Moving students towards experiencing the subject in the way the teacher intends requires knowing how students are experiencing what is being taught (Prosser & Trigwell, 1999, p. 23). This is true for teaching students to use information, just as it is for chemistry, sociology, or anything that can be learned. Emphasizing learning as an outcome of using information, recent research focusing on information experience has been referred to as informed learning research (Bruce and Preliminary findings from a current informed learning study into how a teacher and students experience learning to use information in an undergraduate writing course are presented to illustrate the educative benefits of researching information experience. This supports the suitability of phenomenography as a research approach to study information Many years ago I read The Seven Faces of Information Literacy, which reported the seminal findings of a phenomenographic study of how higher educators experience information literacy (Bruce, 1997). Each of the seven categories reported in the study's findings describes a different information literacy experience: information technology, information sources, information process, information control, knowledge construction, knowledge extension and wisdom. I was skeptical that the categories described in the Seven Faces would be applicable to undergraduate students, who I thought might experience using information very differently from educators. I decided to conduct similar studies to the Seven Faces study, but with undergraduate participants (Maybee, 2006, 2007). These studies aimed to reveal how the students working in an undergraduate context experienced using information to complete This article is © Emerald Group Publishing and permission has been granted for this version to appear here (http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/). Emerald does not grant permission for this article to be further copied/distributed or hosted elsewhere without the express permission from Emerald Group Publishing Limited. 2 their assignments. Following phenomenographic protocols, I interviewed students, asking questions designed to get them to describe how they used information for this purpose. Then I iteratively …