Robert Sandieson

Dr. Robert Sandieson, PhD

Associate Professor

Dr. Robert Sandieson, PhD

Associate Professor

My interest is information literacy and information science; particularly research knowledge acquisition and dissemination to facilitate informed decision-making. The focus is how research databases, such as ERIC, PsycINFO, and Medline, contribute to this goal. I am developing a new information retrieval methodological framework called Pearl Harvesting, which has been shown to dramatically increase the efficiency of searches.

Dr. Robert (Bob) Sandieson works in the area of autism, intellectual disabilities; cognitive and information science. He is on the board of Western University’s Autism Centre of Excellence, past board member of the Council for Exceptional Children Division on Autism and Developmental Disabilities, and past president of the Canadian Association of Educational Psychologists. His early research with developmental psychologist Robbie Case situated hierarchical instructional design principles within a developmental theory to ensure learners at each stage receive appropriate and successful instruction.

His current research shifted as a result of producing a four edition set of books on intellectual disabilities. An online database of articles in the journal Education and Training in Autism and Developmental Disabilities created to facilitate these books turned out to be a valuable and highly used resource. It also enabled the location of terminology in the larger research databases pertaining to the topics in the journal/books. This then became the genesis of a new information retrieval methodology, Pearl Harvesting; empirically supported with international acclaim. Further research extends this work to new topic areas, e.g., autism, gifted education; and to issues such as how to locate and use a variety of pertinent databases. Documenting exemplar search strategies beyond this initial research takes place on a wiki. Teaching how to search in databases provides both application and inspiration for further work.