Students and Documents: Mindsets and Outcomes

The library contains documents in a variety of formats. As a matter of course, students access these documents as a normal feature of “getting” an education. This poster illustrates three mindsets students adopt as they engage with library documents. 1. Learning -- readers absorb the content into their knowledge base trusting the reliability and authority of the creator of the work. The mindset of the reader is passive. 2. Information Seeking -- readers have a question for which they are seeking an answer, and are assuming that someone who knows the answer has documented it where they can find it. The mindset of the reader is instrumentally active, but cognitively passive. 3. Doing Research -- readers are analyzing an “object.” The authors that are consulted are cited as either giving evidence or as conversation partners. They assume these library mediated documents provide only partial answers and clues. The desired outcome is the creation of new knowledge. The mindset of the reader is cognitively and affectively active. This framework of the mindsets of students as they use library documents is illustrated by referencing typical Seminary course assignments. When this understanding of doing research is explicit in classroom research assignments, it encourages rigor in research performance. A corresponding focus in the library resource access experience reduces the students’ ambiguities and uncertainties