Information Searching for Teaching Purposes

This article deals with the need for educators to provide precise instructional guidelines for students to use during online information searches to ensure relevant search results. The efficient use of information is a key factor to successful information retrieval. If educators do not properly specify what information is required, it would affect particularly novice searchers' perceptions of the perceived ease of information retrieval and therefore their perceptions the usefulness of information searches. The problem goes beyond completing assignments in school or at university, because in the age of knowledge-driven economies many employees have to rely on their online search skills to help solve problems encountered by the organisations that employ them, or to optimise work-place procedures. This would make them not mere searchers, but actual researchers. The authors of this article speculate that educators' imprecise and inadequate search instructions to students may be due to significant epistemological differences between how information is organised on Internet repositories and educators' personal understanding of such information. New insights may be gained by extending information searching to educators' understanding of how online information is organised, can be accessed and translated into knowledge.