The use of information sources by faculty in the School of Education, University of Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania)

The purpose of the study was to examine to what extent types of information sources are used by faculty in the Department of Administrative and Policy Studies (ADMPS), Department of Instruction and Learning (DIL), and Psychology in Education (PIE), at the University of Pittsburgh in the School of Education. During the five stages of a research project (proposal stage, data collection stage, data analysis and interpretation) when initiating study and developing a new course. More importantly, the study attempted to discover the similarities and differences among the School of Education faculty in their information seeking behavior. A survey research method was used. Tools of the present study was a questionnaire that was sent to a number of full-time and tenured faculty (67) in all three departments.; Of the 67 questionnaires sent to the faculty, 40 were returned, making a response rate of 60%. To analyze this data, the researcher adopted both inferential and descriptive statistics as described in the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). Also a one-way ANOVA was used to study the differences between the mean frequencies of the respondents in using formal and informal sources of information.; Results of the study revealed that there were some clear patterns of information used by the School of Education faculty, at the University of Pittsburgh. For example, scientific/scholarly technical journals, monographs, textbooks, radio and television programs, thesis and dissertations were the most frequently used formal sources of information by the faculty of the three departments in the School of Education. It was also observed that the department of DIL and PIE faculty tended to use radio and television more frequently than the ADMPS faculty. Whereas, the ADMPS faculty tended to use journals more than the DIL and PIE faculty. Finally, with regard to the information sources, the PIE faculty consulted reference librarians more frequently than the other departments.; Recommendations based on these findings and suggestions for further research were also discussed.