Information Acquisition in History Ph.d. Students: Inferencing and the Formation of Knowledge Structures
Charles Cole · The Library Quarterly · 1998
The author reports the results of a study of forty-five Ph.D. history students who were asked questions about cognitive activity related to information events. Using Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss' grounded theory approach, two overall categories of cognitive activity were observed: categories about knowledge structure and categories about information process. Teun van Dijk and Walter Kintsch's "situation model" theory of reading comprehension and Leo Noordman and Wietske Vonk's research into elaborative inferencing form the theoretical framework for the study. In light of the results, three tentative conclusions are made about the characteristics of Ph.D. history students' knowledge structure and information process: (1) they become informed in a four-part information process; (2) they have a two-part knowledge structure, which allows for data storage; and (3) as a result of these two characteristics, elaborative inferencing for history Ph.D. students is hybrid, occurring both "on-line" and "off-line." The hybrid nature of their elaborative inferencing may be one of the features that distinguish the domain expert from the domain novice.