An inquiry-based approach to teaching research methods in Information Studies

This paper presents the results of a project that aimed at restructuring the delivery of research methods training at the Information School at the University of Sheffield, UK, based on an Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) approach. The purpose of this research was to implement inquiry-based learning that would allow customization of research methods when applied to individual and small group learning and address the challenges of teaching in a large, diverse classroom. Discussion triads, inquiry-based seminars, and a poster session were integrated with traditional teaching methods to facilitate the development of student dissertation proposals as the module outcome. This paper presents the context and rationale for the project, the nature of inquiry-based learning, the context and changes introduced in the course module, teaching techniques and the evaluation of the project and outlines the lessons learned through the project. These include: the need to address a perceived disjunction between self-directed inquiry based activities and the classical mode of lecture delivery, requiring reviewing student experiences from an information consumption frame to a knowledge discovery frame; this, in turn, requires the development of evaluation frames that are devolved to students and differ from 'customer feedback' approaches that tend to be adopted in centrally devised questionnaires at many Universities.