Investigating the Effect of Personal Knowledge Management and Information Seeking Behavior on Self-Efficacy of the Graduate Students of Tabriz University

At present, the Internet has created tremendous changes in information seeking and research activities in scientific communities; but among these, there are successful people who use the created opportunities to their advantage with the help of management tools and new technologies. Personal knowledge management is one of these tools. Considering that knowledge is a necessary and vital resource for success, the study of knowledge management process, especially in organizations, should be considered. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of personal knowledge management and information seeking behavior on students' self-efficacy.

The current research is applied in terms of purpose and in terms of methodology; it is correlation with the approach of presenting the structural equation model. The statistical population of this research was all graduate students of Tabriz University. Regarding the statistical sample, considering that the method of selective analysis for the hypotheses of this research is in the form of structural equations, they were 190 students, which seems suitable due to the ease of access and also the number (according to the rank of the university). Based on this, the sampling method in the current research was simple random sampling. The measurement tool in the present study was a questionnaire. In the current research, three questionnaires were used: Wilson's  information-seeking behavior standard questionnaire, with 6 items; 2. Mohiuddin et al.'s standard personal knowledge management questionnaire, with 7 items; and the standard self-efficacy questionnaire of Sherer et al. with 6 items.

The results showed that there was no significant difference between the variables of gender and age and personal knowledge management among university graduate students. According to the path coefficient values, there is a significant relationship between personal knowledge management variables and information seeking behavior with self-efficacy. Also the models that are analyzed with a variance-based approach through variance-based software such as Smart PLS do not have a general index to look at the model at once. That is, there is no index to measure the entire model similar to the variance-based approach. However, in various researches in this field, it was suggested that an index called GOF, which was proposed by Tenenhaus, Esposito Vinzi, Chatenlin, Larue, can be used instead of the fit indices that exist in covariance-oriented approaches. This index considers both structural and measurement models simultaneously and tests their quality. This index is manually calculated as average R2 and average shared values.

Regarding the obtained results, it can be said that by improving the behavior of educational and research information and getting familiar with the motivations, goals and correct methods of searching, it saves time and money of researchers. Researchers can obtain relevant and reliable information and use it to complete their educational and research activities in order to avoid repetitions or using the trial and error method. People who have good skills, abilities and knowledge, evaluate their judgment and evaluation in reaching the desired goal and position higher. Based on the approach of social learning, cognitive learning and thinkers such as Bandura, the evaluation of people and their self-efficacy in achieving desirable situations and desired goals is influenced by their knowledge, cognition, and the way they organize their knowledge; When people have sufficient knowledge and understanding of desired situations and goals and can organize their knowledge, they see themselves as more capable in achieving their goals; That means they experience higher self-efficacy. In this regard, knowledge management also means collecting, acquiring, understanding, categorizing and sharing knowledge. Therefore, it can be expected that personal knowledge management will improve people's self-efficacy; because it increases a person's knowledge and awareness of desirable situations and goals.