På tal om källor : En studie av lärarstudenters informationsanvändning i examensarbetet

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this Master’s thesis is to investigate the information use in teacher education students’ degree projects. The first study is a reference analysis used to categorize the cited sources in 33 degree projects from the teacher education program at one Swedish university. The aim was to find out what types of sources were used, in particular the amount of citations to scholarly publications. The results of the reference analysis showed that the majority of sources used were text books. Scholarly publications amounted to 10% of the citations and scholarly articles were scarcely used. The second study consists of semi-structured interviews with six supervisors to gain understanding of their functions in relation to information use and to find out what judgements supervisors make of the reliability of sources. The supervisors were found to have four functions: suggest literature, refer students to the library, guide selection of sources and instruct on the use of literature. Doctoral theses, scholarly articles and research based literature are source types with a high degree of reliability according to the supervisors, while sources without a foundation in research were considered to have a low degree of reliability. The interview data was analysed using Norman Fairclough’s model of critical discourse analysis and the cognitive authority of source types was discussed. This thesis identifies a discrepancy between sources used by students and the supervisors’ judgements of reliable sources and the conclusion is that increased knowledge and use of scholarly publications holds a potential for teacher education and the teaching profession.