If the Engineering Literature Fits, Use It! Student Application of Grey Literature and Engineering Standards

Chelsea Leachman; Jacob William Leachman

doi:10.18260/p.24218

If the Engineering Literature Fits, Use It! Student Application of Grey Literature and Engineering StandardsThe ACRL information literacy standards include the need for students to use informationeffectively to accomplish a specific purpose. To use information for a specific purpose studentsshould have an ability to differentiate the types of information available, assess the relevance andcredibility of the source to their application, and then apply the information within the context oftheir writing. Engineering students are usually aware of monographs and periodicals fromintroductory library instruction but are unfamiliar with grey literature and engineering standards.To address this need, a collaboration between library and engineering instruction for a seniorlevel capstone mechanical engineering design course was created. The course consisted of 3independent sections of approximately 20 students each that were randomly paired and assignedprojects from the same pool of 10 system-level experiments. The students were tasked withdeveloping a full analysis and report of the system-level performance of their respectiveexperiment. Library instruction occurred during the second lecture of class and consisted of afifty minute overview presentation followed by two hours of work time. All sections werepresented information types as five different categories: monographs, scholarly articles, greyliterature, standards, and multimedia. One section of the class was randomly selected andpresented information types placed into contextual uses within example sections of a report andassigned a worksheet requiring them to find sources specific to their project and list them withinthe report section they planned to implement the literature. The efficacy of this pedagogicalchange to contextualize examples followed by immediate application was assessed by measuringthe frequency and type of citations used by all 3 sections of the class. Citation analysis found astatistically insignificant 4.6% increase in total number of citations used by the test sectionstudents. Although the utilization of engineering standards did not increase, the use of greyliterature in the test section doubled compared with the two control sections taught by the sameengineering faculty. Furthermore the test section decreased their use of multimedia information.Two subsequent sections of the course taught by other engineering faculty are also compared.This provides a preliminary indication that contextualizing library instruction by informationtype increases the diversity of literature utilized by engineering students. The overall credibilityof citations utilized by students in their reports are likely to increase if this diversity increases theuse of grey literature and standards.

If the Engineering Literature Fits, Use It! Student Application of Grey Literature and Engineering Standards

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