Biography
Alison J. Head, Ph.D. is the Executive Director of Project Information Literacy (PIL), a research institute dedicated to conducting ongoing, large-scale research studies about college students and their research habits. She is also a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Senior Researcher at the metaLAB (at) Harvard. PIL has conducted ongoing research studies since 2011 and has interviewed or surveyed over 22,000 U.S. college students to investigate how they conducted course-related and everyday life research and find and use information in the digital age. PIL is the largest scholarly research study (by sample size) about information literacy in the U.S. that has ever been undertaken. In 2018, PIL published a groundbreaking survey (N=5,844) on how students engage with news (funded by the Knight Foundation). In 2016, PIL released an extensive study of lifelong learning needs and practices by recent graduates of college (funded by IMLS). In 2012, PIL launched "The PIL Passage Studies," a unique series of studies about the challenges college students face as they transition from one complex information landscape to the next. Alison's academic areas of interest include information-seeking behaviors of early adults, information literacy and lifelong learning, Web adoption and diffusion, human-computer interaction, and usage of social media for collaborative learning. Alison is the author of two books about interface design and usability: Design Wise: A Guide for Evaluating the Interface Design of Information Resources (CyberAge Books, 1999) and On-the-Job Research: How Usable Are Corporate Research Intranets? (Special Libraries Association, 2002). She has a Ph.D. in Information Science from U.C. Berkeley's Information School, a Masters in Journalism from Boston University, and studied Human-Computer Interaction at Stanford University, as a Visiting Scholar.
EDUCAUSE Publications
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"This paper presents findings about the challenges today’s college freshmen face, and the information seeking strategies they develop, use, and adapt as they make the transition from high school to college and begin to complete college - level research assignments."
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Qualitative findings about the information-seeking behavior of today’s college graduates as they transition from the campus to the workplace.
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The paper presents findings from 560 interviews with undergraduates on 10 campuses distributed across the US, as part of Project Information Literacy (PIL).