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Reflective review

R.5. Fieldwork

This study being an enquiry both on students’ experience of the information seeking and research process and on my experience of action research, two parallel cycles of action research were developed, adopting different methods: focus groups, analysis of students’

tasks, observation and individual interviews were the investigating techniques chosen to analyse students’ learning and the variation occurred in their experience, while reflective journal and peer observation were related to my experience of action research. Peer observation was used also as a validation method for the assessment of students’ learning.

182 R.5.1. Focus groups

Focus groups were adopted for the initial stage of the enquiry, in order to gain understanding of students’ experience before the learning activity and also to identify students’ expectations and needs.

Focus groups provided rich and meaningful data in a limited amount of time. Moreover, this technique appeared a valuable approach for encouraging students to express their doubts, difficulties and expectation The only problem related to focus groups was the recruitment of students, who were on holiday and therefore were not easily contacted.

The lack of time was the reason why a pilot test was not carried out, which could be probably helpful to practice group interviewing skills.

R.5.2. Analysis of students’ tasks

The analysis of students’ tasks was conducted in order to assess students’ learning.

Concept maps, learning journals and group work were analysed according to predefined criteria. The assessment of students’ learning was validated by peer observers and this revealed to be an effective way to analyse and compare evaluation criteria and to assess the same teacher’s assessment skills.

However, the analysis of students’ task wouldn’t been enough to understand their level of learning and the progress they made, if considered without the findings from individual in-depth interviews. The analysis of tasks was in some way enlightened by what students themselves stated, during interviews, about their own learning.

R.5.3. Observation

Observation of students was helpful to verify if searching skills, acquired during the learning activity were still mastered some weeks later. However, even if students were required to “think aloud”, this technique did not provide particularly interesting results.

Probably students perceived this activity mainly as an examination and therefore simply tried to perform well, without offering comments or personal opinions. Students’

observation was probably the only stage of the learning activity when students felt the presence of the teacher as slightly intimidating.

R.5.4. In depth interviews

Individual interview was the most effective and fruitful technique to gain understanding of students’ learning and to verify changes occurred in their experience of the information seeking and research process. Interviewing students’ was also a way of acquiring a feedback on the learning activity itself and an interesting opportunity to deepen my own understanding of this experience.

Adopting an unstructured type of interview revealed to be the right choice, since a number of unexpected topics emerged from students. Moreover, the friendly relationships established during the learning activity took the most of this technique. The negative side of interviews is the fact that they are highly time-consuming. Twenty five interviews with students and two interviews with critical friends took about 40 hours of meetings and about 100 hours of tape transcription. The same tape transcribing, however, was an enlightening stage of the enquiry, as it allowed to in-depth analyse students’ statements, connecting them with reflections recorded in the learning journals and with the way each students represented learning contents in the concept map. This provided a very rich picture of each student’s learning and experience.

R.5.5. Peer observation

Peer observation was crucial both for validating the assessment of students’ learning and for enhancing researcher’s understanding.

Though a checklist had been prepared in order to support critical friends’ observation, the most interesting and meaningful remarks came from spontaneous comments during interviews.

In this experience, the presence of critical friends was much more encouraging and supporting than threatening, probably because of existing friendly relationships. For action researchers, peer observation represents an important step towards communication and

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dissemination of findings that are shared and discussed with others, even before the piece of research has been completed. While in this study the availability of colleagues made it easy to adopt peer observation, probably such method is to be considered very demanding in terms of time and efforts in a library context. In fact, information literacy activities are often something added on to daily library workload and librarians usually find it difficult devoting time to teaching activities, let alone to peer observation.

R.5.6. Reflective journal

The reflective journal was important to record events as well as questions and doubts arising while the action research was being carried out. This appeared particularly helpful to recall the development of some phases of the work, which was needed for reporting on the research. However, during the fieldwork the reflective journal became something very similar to a logbook. Using the journal as a tool for encouraging reflection was much more difficult than expected, as it is described in the reflective section. This was caused perhaps by the pressure of time, particularly during the learning activity and the evaluating phase. The need to interview students, to transcribe tapes and analyse them, to examine written tasks and provide students with feedback, allowed a very limited time for reflection. The actual reflection started when the fieldwork had been completed and the final data analysis started.