Information-seeking Behaviour and Issues of Agriculture Undergraduates of University of Peradeniya

This paper discusses the information seeking behaviour of the agriculture undergraduates in a Sri Lankan university. It established that the undergraduates often use the search engines, Wikipedia, and their own classmates than the other information resources; they use more self-taught methods than standard methods to evaluate the resources and seek help from the classmates in using the information resources. Findings further proved that their uses of various productivity tools are very low and the information-related research tasks are difficult for the majority. The paper concludes that these are the effects of inadequate information literacy (IL) training they receive and the study strongly recommends offering appropriate, context specific IL programmes, to enhance their information resource usage and research skills.


Introduction
Globally, there is a rapid growth of research literature in agriculture which makes it imperative for the students to develop their information seeking and using behavior.
However, searching, accessing and using information is a complex issue for them without any support or guidance from the library and teaching staff.Understanding the trends, strengths and weaknesses of the information seeking behaviour of the agriculture students is vital for the library staff in order to provide them with a quality and relevant service.This paper emanates from a comprehensive research on "Information seeking and research strategies of undergraduates in the digital age" carried out at University of Peradeniya during December 2012 to December 2013.The objectives of the study were to 1) to study the information seeking practices of undergraduates in the digital age, 2) to study the research strategies of undergraduates in the digital age and 3) to make recommendations for the future developments of the information seeking and research practices of the undergraduates.

Survey of Literature
There is little evidence of research carried out on the Sri Lankan agriculture undergraduates.Therefore, the survey of literature was extended to international studies carried out since 2000.Cheunwattana at.al. (2012) surveyed 2,435 respondents in six public universities in Thailand selected using stratified random sample with the objective studying the information literacy practices of college students in course-related and everyday-life research.The study established that the students heavily rely on search engines while their abilities in evaluating information resources were only moderate.The majority of students did not give enough importance to evaluation.Defining a topic for the assignment, narrowing down the topic, getting started on the assignment and evaluating the sources were recorded as the most difficult research-related tasks.Rhoades…et.al. (2008), surveyed 255 second and third year students enrolled in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences of University of Florida, and established that search engines and WebCT were utilized by most.The Internet was seen to be moderately good, easy to understand, important, easy to find, beneficial, believable and credible.Hadimani and Rajgoli (2010) carried out a survey in a College of Agriculture in Rainchur, India using a questionnaire distributed to 90 randomly selected undergraduates.The study established that 94.44% know when they are in need of information, 100% know where to find information, 66.66% search Internet for information and 100% search in the college library.Of the respondents, 95.55% are able to search exact information, 94.44% contact library staff to access information, 91.11% has the ability to evaluate information in terms of currency, authority and appropriateness.The authors have concluded that the college should have separate funding and other support for an information literacy agenda, technological infrastructure needs to be improved and that the librarians and faculty should collaborate to develop discipline-specific research skills.These conclusions imply that many development initiatives are required to increase the information skills of the undergraduates although their attitudes toward their information skills are highly positive according to the responses.Adio and Arinola (2012) studying 180 senior students in the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences in LAUTECH 1 , established that Internet was used by 74% followed by textbooks (66%), theses and dissertations (63%), and CD/ROM databases (39%), and that most students lack basic knowledge and skills in using available resources and services in the library.Lack of facilities and inadequacy of computers in the library were identified as barriers.Aggressive information awareness for all students, an orientation in information searching tools and improving computer and Internet facilities are recommended.
In the Sri Lankan context, two studies on undergraduates are reported.Ileperuma and Mudannayake (2008), studied the agriculture and science undergraduates and postgrdautes and the findings established that , books are the most important information source followed by lecture notes and handouts.Electronic material had a low priority but an increasing trend to use Internet as an infromation source was perceived.Nevertheless, the paper present only the cumulative findings, therefore the specific characteristics of agriculture undergraduates cannot be known.The second study by Dilrukshi (2014) examined the usage of online journals by the fourth year undergraduates (number not specified), and established that 52% prefer online journals and 48% prefer printed journals.
The study further established the barriers to the use of online journals as; the absence of proper training on using online resources, limited time available for students to search online journals, poor knowledge of online jorunals, and lack of computer facilities in the faculty.Sound awareness programmes, allocation of time in the timetables to use the library, frequent training programmes and increased computer facilities in the faculty have been recommended.

Methodology
An online questionnaire used by Head and Eisenberg (2009) was adapted to suit the Sri Lankan context and to be administered as a printed questionnaire.This instrument was 1 Latoke Akintola University of Technology, Ogbomoso, Nigeria particularly considered because; access to it is open, its content and construct validity has already been established by the researchers (Head andEisenberg 2009, 2010), and a pilot survey conducted in 2010 by the researcher proved its usability in the Sri Lankan context.Moreover, the original instrument has been used with some customizations in several other Asian countries in 2012 (i.e.Cheunwattana.et.al, 2012) therefore the findings would be comparable in the future.However, only the academic research component was used in this survey as the aim of the information seeking behavior in the academic research.
Several changes were made to make the instrument suitable for the Sri Lankan context.
Instead of listing university names in Question 1 of the original instrument, a space was provided for respondents to write their university.The American terms used in Question 2 to denote the year of study were replaced with the terminology used in Sri Lanka (second, third and fourth year of study).Question 3 on disciplines, was divided in to three parts to obtain the a) faculty, b) department of study, and c) Grade Point Average of the previous year.Two new questions (Question 4 and 5) were added to obtain the age and gender of the respondents.Six new questions on the access to computers by the undergraduates and the training they have received in using the library and Internet were also added to the instrument, as comprehensive data on these were not available in the university.The final survey instrument contained 20 questions, but this paper is based on the data gathered on, types of assignments the students have to answer, types of information resources used often, methods used to evaluate them, and difficulty of research related information tasks as encountered by the undergraduates.
Since access to e-mail by the students is limited, a printed version of the questionnaire was administered through the faculty library in early 2013 and the data collection was completed within two months.Faculty web sites and annual reports as well as some faculty members and the Senior Assistant Librarian of the faculty were used to triangulate the findings.To provide the theoretical foundations for the study and the findings, international and Sri Lankan research literature related to information seeking behaviour of agriculturalists was used.Of 688 students in their second, third and fourth years, 10% were selected using Stratified Random Sample method.The questionnaire was administered through the faculty library and the departments and the response rates were 92%, 100% and 100% respectively, while the overall response rate was 97%.First year students were disregarded as their use of information was not expected to be advanced enough to respond to the questionnaire effectively.This paper discusses the findings of all students surveyed instead of making a year-wise analysis.
Students were given seven choices1 , as in the original survey to express their responses on frequency of using information resources and methods of evaluating them.In presenting data, the response categories "Almost Always" and "Often" were conflated in to a new category of "Often Used".For difficulties of course-related research also, seven choices2 were given and Strongly Agree and Somewhat Agree were conflated into "Agree".These two new categories were used to present the findings throughout this paper.The rest of the categories (Sometimes -No Experience 3 and Neither Agree Nor Disagree -No Experience with this Situation 4 ) were not considered for the analysis as the number of responses for these categories were extremely few and would not have made any significant change in the findings.MS.Excel was used to quantitatively analyze and present findings graphically.
As the responses are personal judgments of the respondents, of their information seeking strategies, and the findings of the survey are mostly based on their responses, the reliability of the findings largely depends on the accuracy of their revelations.Nevertheless, the findings can be generalized to the total student body of the faculty as the sample is representative and the student cohorts are principally homogenous.

Findings
The following sections discuss the findings under several themes; age, gender and GPA of the respondents, types of assignments received, resources consulted, evalution criteria, people asked for assistantce with evaluation of material, and difficulty of tasks related to course-related research.

Age, Gender and GPA of the Respondents
Of the total respondents, the majority (66%) were in the age group of 24-26 years, 51% were females and, 55% had received a Grade Point Average (GPA) of 3.0-3.5Table 1 presents the details.

Aspect
Frq

Types of Assignments Received
Table 2 depicts the types of assignments they receive during their study period.Sixty one percent (61%) stated that they receive "Oral presentations" and 52% commented that they receive "Papers that present a case study analysis" while 49% confirmed that they receive "Multimedia product preparation that requires research".These findings denote that they have been provided with many opportunities to use a wide variety of information resources for their course-related research.

Resources Consulted
Three types of resources they used were surveyed; digital, human and printed (Table 3).Of the digital resources the most often used were the search engines (96%) and Wikipedia (73%), but only 18% often used full text databases.Of the human resources, classmates (66%), lecturers (64%), and friends and family (37%) were the most often used.Of the printed resources, recommended readings (58%), and the library collections (45%) were the most often used while 40% used their personal collections.

Evaluation Criteria
This section surveyed two aspects; criteria used to evaluate library material and criteria used to evaluate web-based material.Respondents were offered ten criteria (Table 4 and Figure 2) to select according the frequency they used each criteria to evaluate library material.In evaluating library material, 61% each considered the currency of the book, and, whether the charts of the item contain vital information.Whether they have used the item before, is considered by 46%.The reputation of the publisher and whether the respondents have heard about the item before, is considered each by 39%.Authors' credentials are used by 25% while librarians' recommendation is considered by 16%.Respondents were offered twelve criteria (Table 5 and Figure 3) to select according to the frequency they used each to evaluate web-based resources.Currency of the website (63%), availability of vital information in the charts of the item (60%), while, 48% each considered whether they have heard of the website before (48%) or used the website before (48%) and whether the website has links to the other resources (43%).URL (34%), design of the website (30%) and librarians recommendations (13%) are not used by many.

People Asked for Assistance
The respondents were asked about the people they consult when they need assistance in selecting the most relevant information resources from the plethora (Table 6 and Figure 4).

Use of Productivity Tools
Use of Productivity Tools were anaylsed under three headings; software solutions, Web 2.0, and Virtual Research Environment (Table 7 and Figure 5).Of the Software solutions, 60% use highlighting features, 21% use digital sticky notes but only 12% use citationmaking programs like End Note.Of the Web 2.0 elements, a higher percentage (69%) uses only the document sharing but others (social bookmarking, microblogs and blogging, online time management programs, wikis, photo-sharing sites, voice over Internet (Skype) as well virtual research environments are used by, less than 50% of the students.

Difficulty of Tasks
Respondents were presented with twenty different tasks related to getting started, searching, evaluating, using, citing information, and completing the assignment writing process and were asked to state their opinion on the difficulty of these tasks (Table 8 and Figure 6) .Of the starting process, 76% confirmed that starting is difficult while 72% found narrowing down the topic is difficult and defining the topic of the assignment was difficult for 67%.
With regard to searching for information, 58% claimed that finding up-to-date material is difficult and 55% expressed that sorting through irrelevant results to find what is relevant is difficult, while 52% confirmed that it is difficult to find the information within the different parts of the university.For 42%, identifying the keywords to be used was difficult while for 37%, finding articles from the library databases were difficult.Finding information from Internet was difficult for 33%.As far as evaluating of sources is concerned, 49% agreed that determining the credibility of a web site is difficult while 48% agreed that evaluating the sources is difficult.
As far as using the information is concerned, 48% agreed reading through the material is often difficult and for 36% writing is often difficult.As far as the citing is concerned, 37% agreed that they often have a difficulty in knowing when to cite and for 33% it is often difficult to know how to cite a source and 31% 38% agreed that knowing whether the use of a source in certain circumstances constitutes plagiarism or not is often difficult.With regard to completing the process, 36% claimed that it is often difficult to know whether a "good job" is done or not and 31% claimed that deciding whether the writing is finished or not is difficult.However, their use of library collection is low (45%) and only 21% considered librarians as an information source while only 10% turned to librarians for assistance with using information resources.The inadequate use of library is also a trend prevailing in accordance with the global trend.Inconvenience, lack of time, confusion over how to begin the search for resources, having problems with navigating the mechanisms to locate materials, and getting intimidated by seeking assistance from the staff in addition to library anxiety are perceived as reasons for the low use of the library (Colon-Aguirre and Fleming-May 2012).Adio and Arinola (2012), established that the constraints faced by the students are; the unwillingness of the library staff to assist them, inadequacy of library opening hours, lack of relevant books, periodicals and other information resources in library.The current study did not make an in-depth analysis of usage pattern of the library by the agriculture students, but it was observed that there is a considerable distance between the lecture theatres and the library, which can make it inconvenient for the students to visit the library frequently while attending lectures.However, further research would be required to make any comments about why the usage is low.
Several studies have established why student prefer certain information resources over the others, even if the librarians and their teachers perceive that certain other resources are better in quality than what the students prefer.It indicates that the Sri Lankan respondents select their information resources based on convenience and ease of access.Head and Eisenberg (2009) have identified three criteria (Traditional standards of timeliness and authority, Domain specific standards, and Self-taught standards) for evaluating information resources.Findings indicated that the respondents use one traditional (currency) and two self-taught methods (previously used, and availability of vital information in charts of the item) often, to evaluate the library material.They often use three self-taught methods (previously heard, previous use, and availability of vital information in charts) and one traditional method (currency) to evaluate Internet-based resources.Although Head and Eisenberg established that their subjects evaluate internetbased material more than the library material, this was not evident in this Sri Lankan study.
The percentages of students who use evaluation methods were almost equal for both types of resources.It was observed that the use of reliable evaluation methods was not adequate.
Their evaluation methods need to be improved especially as they often use search engines, Wikipedia, and classmates more than the other more reliable resources.
Very low use of productivity tools by the respondents are similar to that of Head and Eisenberg (2010).They established that, except the highlighting features (by 62%), citation making programmes (by 55%) and document sharing programmes (by 48%) other tools are not adequately used for academic research.Cheunwattana et.al. (2012) also established that the respondent' use productivity tools is not significant.Head and Eisenberg (2010) opined that "even though the students may be heavy users of social networking sites such as Facebook, Web 2.0 applications for academic research have not yet found their way into students' research repertoire -yet" (Head and Eisenberg (2010, p. 23).However, a study carried out in Malaysia (Zakaria, Watson and Edwards 2010) has confirmed that the general opinion about integrating Web 2.0 tools in to learning is positive although some degree of inexperience and hesitancy was noted in particular tools.Students are passive in the context of content construction but regularly download information.Kumar (2009) presenting the findings of a study undergraduate perceptions of the usefulness of Web 2.0 comment that students' familiarity with the new technologies for other purposes, does not always translate to their use of those technologies for learning.She further comments that the students welcome the use of technologies for teaching and learning when they have had prior successful experience with them.In her study, the familiarity of the students with certain technologies like Facebook, outside education, made it possible for them to reflect on their educational value.
Students' lack of knowledge in routine research practices was ascertained by the findings on their difficulties of research related tasks implying that their research related information skills are considerably low.Of the ten most difficult tasks for them, three are related with the starting process and the other seven are related to evaluation of the sources, knowing the credibility of a website, finding information from different parts, filtering relevant information from irrelevant, and finding up-to-date material.The findings have proved that they need to develop their research related information skills.Nevertheless, these findings are not uncommon.Head & Eisenberg (2009, 2010) established that for 84% of their respondents, getting started was difficult.Cheunwattana et.al. (2012) also established that starting the research was difficult for 46%.

Conclusion and Recommendations
The findings lead to the conclusion, that the agriculture undergraduates use search engines, Therefore, it is strongly recommended that the students be provided with adequate training in to use the information resources effectively and consult librarians for assistance when they need expertise to help them.They need to be trained in searching for information from

Figure 2 :
Figure 2 : Criteria used to evaluate library resources

Figure 3 :
Figure 3 : Criteria used to evaluate web-based resources

Figure 4 :
Figure 4 : People asked for assistance

Figure 5 :
Figure 5 : Use of Productivity Tools

Figure 6 :
Figure 6 : Difficulty of tasks Wikipedia and classmates often as information resources, use more self-taught methods to evaluate resources, consult classmates more often than any other group of people for help, and they have problems in research-related tasks.Under these circumstances, serious attention should be paid to the quality of the Information-seeking behavior of the agriculture students.These findings strongly establish that the agriculture students urgently need more support from the faculty and the librarians to improve their information-seeking behaviour if they are to exploit the rich library and internet-based information resources for their learning and research.Delving in to the training they receive in Information Literacy or library usage proved that 52% have not received any such training while 48% accepted they received such training.This training is limited to the 45-60 minute orientation programme provided once the new students enrolled in the faculty.Absence or lack of training in information skills can be identified as the main reason for the weaknesses in their information-seeking behaviour and the research practices.

Table 1 :
Age, Gender and GPA of the Respondents

Table 2 :
Types of Assignments Received

Table 3 :
Resources Consulted O -Often S -Sometimes N -Never D/N -Don't Know/No Experience Figure 1: Resources Consulted

Table 4 :
Criteria used to evaluate library resources

Table 5 :
Criteria used to evaluate web-based resources

Table 6 -People Asked for Assistance
O -Often S -Sometimes N -Never D/N -Don't Know/No Experience

Table 7 :
Use of Productivity tools

Table 8 :
Difficulty of Tasks