A Study of the Information Seeking Behavior of Undergraduate Students Essay

1.Introduction Information seeking behavior has been studied in several groups in recent decades. Different people have different information seeking behaviours, and this proposal chooses to a study the information seeking behaviours of undergraduate students. First of all, I want to provide some general knowledge of information seeking behaviour. Information seeking is one of the fundamental activities that undergraduate students practice in the process of gathering information and building knowledge. The information seeking behaviour begins when the information seeker realizes that he or she is lacking some knowledge which will help her or him fulfil a higher level goal and college students mainly seek information to fill in the gap that occurs basically as a result of lack of information regarding a specific topic. Information seeking behaviour refers to the way people search for and utilise information. Wilson (2000) described that information behaviour as the totality of human behaviour in relation to sources and channels of information, including both active and passive information-seeking, and information use. He described information seeking behaviour as purposive seeking of information as a consequence of a need to satisfy some goal. Information seeking behaviour is the micro-level of behaviour employed by the searcher in interacting with information systems of all kinds, be it between the seeker and the system, or the pure method of creating and following up on a search. In this report, I will present more information about information seeking behaviour of undergraduate students. 2.Aims and Objectives   Some scholars have investigated the relationship between information seeking behaviour, personality and approach to studying (Jannica, 2000). However, this proposal will focus on the undergraduate students. The research question for this study will be centred on where did the students get information from when they are lacking in knowledge? Furthermore, the study will examine the influence of students’ gender and course of study on the pattern of information seeking by the students.In addition, more specifically this study is designed to explore the following questions and the methodology of the study is designed to answer these questions.