The study that I'm proposing for this course's final assignment would be considered an information experiment. The purpose of my proposed study is to gain insight into how post secondary students engage with academic information resources. In particular, I'm interested in how efficient students are at navigating institution produced websites to locate certain pieces of academic information. My experiment would consist of a series of one on one interviews where a student is asked a series of questions about their information seeking behaviour. Observation sessions would also be set up for these students, where they would be asked to perform certain tasks with an information resource (e.g. find a course timetable on the Registrar's Office's website) while their clicks are measured quantitatively and qualitatively.
My proposed study would be considered a traditional experiment as it would occur in a controlled setting. There are many variables that would need to be controlled for when recruiting participants for the study. Some of these include: student's year of study, familiarity with the information resource, comfort level with technology. Some of the independent variables of this study include: the list of tasks that the participant is asked to complete, the information resource (e.g. which website) that is used, the technological resources available to the participant (e.g. no use of google). Some of the dependent variables include: how many clicks it takes the participant to complete the task, whether or not the participant is able to complete the tasks successfully.
Armed with the results and information learned from this first experiment, changes could be made to the information resource in question, and a second round of this experiment could be held to see if these improvements made an impact. Essentially, I want to learn information through an experiment, that will help facilitate better access to information.
I think this is a great experiment, Ling! I personally feel that many academic information resources are considered user-friendly (i.e. by the people who made them and by professionals who use them regularly), however, may not have the same level of user-friendliness for students. As a student, I know how frustrating it is to be using an academic information resource and it just not cooperating with what I want to do. What is great about your study is that since you want to count the number of clicks, you will be able to pinpoint exactly what parts of the resource need improvement (instead of just saying the whole thing is not user-friendly enough for students).
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