2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The Materials Processing course at Unnamed University enrolls both Master’s level students with a concentration in Materials and undergraduates who select the course as an elective for their combined BS/MS degree. For the term project, students work in teams to research and write a journal quality review article detailing the state of the art for a particular process. The goal of this study was to assess students’ information literacy (IL) skills as demonstrated in this term project to identify IL skills with which graduate and upper-level undergraduate students may need more support. A secondary goal was to examine any differences in information literacy between the undergraduate students and the graduate students, many of whom are speaking English as a second language.

A customized version of the VALUE rubric for Information Literacy was used to assess a sample of 25 term projects from two semesters spanning 2021-2022. A Mechanical Engineering faculty member rated half the criteria that required more subject matter expertise. An Engineering Librarian rated the other half of the criteria that are more research-oriented. This method resulted in substantial time savings and increased expertise in overall ratings.

Initial results show strong positive correlations between the ability to recognize key concepts that require evidence and the ability to provide that evidence using appropriate sources. These positive correlations are significant at α = 0.05. Recognizing key concepts that require evidence is one of the weakest skills, along with the ability to cite sources accurately and synthesize information from several sources to achieve the purpose of the work. A concerning initial finding was a negative correlation between the number of graduate students on a team and the ability to cite sources accurately. Although this finding is only significant at α = 0.1, the data seem to back up previous anecdotal evidence as observed by the instructor. More work is required to determine the effect of English language learners on outcomes.