Informing Science and Andragogy: A Conceptual Scheme of Client-Side Barriers to Informing University Students

This research leverages both education and informing science research to develop a conceptual model that will assist university professors and students in identifying and overcoming barriers to informing. Since a full study of all barriers, those on the part of the informer, the channel, and the client, would be too extensive for a single paper, we focus here on client-side barriers, i.e., those inherent in the student or the student’s immediate situation. We ferret out 24 specific barriers to andragogical learning from the education literature and identify 12 underlying constructs, which we categorize using the concepts of institutional, situational, and dispositional barriers from the education literature. The client-side conceptual scheme of informing specific to the domain of andragogical learning that is presented here likely has application in other informing realms, inside and outside of education. Within the realm of education, it demonstrates how education research can be viewed from an informing science perspective.