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 What students like
Why seniors & not underclassmen
Where students want help
Constructing an inquiry
Evaluating sources
Composing the report
Role for expert researcher
WHAT
STUDENTS LIKE ABOUT RESEARCH PROJECTS
Students believe that some of their most positive learning experiences
involve writing and research. This is what students like about research
projects:
- Meeting
the challenge of becoming an "expert" on a topic.
- Searching
for answers to real questions.
- Being
surprised by the depth of information and quantity of materials they
uncover.
- Working
with guidance from experienced researchers.
WHY
IS THIS SATISFACTION MORE COMMON AMONG SENIORS THAN IT IS AMONG UNDERCLASSMEN?
Research
strategies students learned in high school are often inadequate to college
tasks. Underclassmen typically apply a research procedure they
learned in high school: select a topic (often broad and "safe");
check out books from a library; make notes on index cards; organize the
information in an outline; and write a report from the note cards and
outline. Unfortunately, this cut-and-paste approach, which often results
in a semi-plagiarized jigsaw puzzle of information, is devoid of the critical
analysis and rhetorical shaping that characterizes what college professors
consider research.
Students often don't comprehend basic research processes. They
don't see connections between, for example, doing a "research paper"
in history and doing an "experiment" in chemistry.
Research in general involves common processes: posing clear questions
or hypotheses, crafting methods to gather relevant data, analyzing and
evaluating different sources of information, and composing a final document.
Instead of seeing these underlying commonalities, many students reinvent
the task every time they do research in a new field. "When I first
got the research assignment, I knew I had to read lots of articles. I
hadn't written a lit review in a 400-level course. I had to learn quickly.
But I'm used to that because in a lot of classes you're left alone to
figure it out by yourself." --- Economics major, University of Hawaii-Manoa
Professors' advice on "writing the research
report" often includes few tips on how to engage in the research
process. While students appreciate professors'
clear guidelines for the research paper's format, they tell us that they
need examples and guidance on the processes of doing research.
WHERE STUDENTS WANT HELP
By the time they are ready to graduate, many students
have learned new research strategies through trial and error in several
different courses. They learned that the research process is recursive---looking
forward to analysis, back to the research questions, then returning to
the data/readings. But students tell us that this learning could have
occurred more smoothly, and earlier, if they'd gotten experienced researchers'
help with three challenges posed by the research task:
- constructing
an inquiry's focus;
- making
sense of the chaos of data or readings; and
- composing
the report of findings or the argument.
Challenge #1: Constructing an inquiry
WHY STUDENTS HAVE PROBLEMS FINDING TOPICS AND FORMING QUESTIONS
-
Students are often unaware that their high-school notions of "reporting
on a topic" don't mesh with their college instructors' expectation
of critical analysis.
- Novices often don't know how to frame research questions that are appropriate
to the field.
APPROACHES
THAT HELP STUDENTS DEVELOP QUESTIONS
- Be
an expert for your student apprentices
Demonstrate how you shape research questions by showing how one of your
recent research projects evolved.
- Use
exploratory writing to uncover topics
Have students explore potential topics through informal writing. You
or your students can list several course topics on the board. Have students
investigate 2 or 3 of the topics by answering questions such as
- What's
your initial position on the topic?
- What
assumptions do you have about the topic?
- What
might you be interested in discovering?
- Why
is the topic relevant or interesting today?
- Explore
peer and field resources
As students explore topics, encourage them to do some related reading
and to talk with their peers or experts in the field. Introduce them
to resources for your field available in the library (CD-ROM, abstracts,
periodicals) and on the Internet.
"Sometimes when I write a paper, I don't know what to write about.
I'm just blank. But once I form questions, I can write half way. Then
I can't continue until I've done enough research. I learned that writing
is a continuous effort." --- Communication major, University of
Hawaii-Manoa
- Assume
an inquirer's stance
Once students have a topic to investigate, they must find in it questions
to answer. A good place to start is with what they don't know, including
the standard who? what? when? and where? Give special attention to why/how
questions that move beyond matters of fact into inquiry:
| What
are some properties of iodine in its ground electronic state? |
Why
are hotel employees leaving corporation X after four weeks? |
| Under
what conditions of temperature and pressure does molecular iodine
exhibit ideal behavior? |
How
can the corporation retain new employees? |
| Why
is this important, to whom, and for what purposes? |
How
is the high turnover rate impacting the corporation? |
Another strategy for creating questions from a topic is
to have students work through a sequence that asks them to name their
topic, state what they want to find, and provide the rationale for the
research:
Challenge
#2: Making sense of the data or readings
WHY STUDENTS HAVE PROBLEMS
ANALYZING INFORMATION
-
The crux of most students' problems with research is simple: the readings
related to their research (e.g., professional journal articles, financial
reports, theory-laden research reports) are difficult.
- Lack
of critical attention and contextual understanding often leads students
to summarize rather than analyze, to misuse quotations, and even to
plagiarize.
- What
you want---that they read critically, pick up links between theory and
data, make links across texts---often requires knowledge and skills
they don't readily have.
APPROACHES THAT HELP STUDENTS
DEVELOP ANALYTIC SKILLS
-
Be an expert for your student apprentices
Show students what you look for when you read journal articles or analyze
information. Show them materials you have read; explain why you underline
passages and write marginal notes, how you code and organize data.
- Encourage
critical responses to reading or data
Require students to write critical responses to readings or data sets
throughout the semester. These responses can take the form of critical
summaries, abstracts, mini pro/con arguments, question lists, "tests"
against personal experience, or theory-based evaluations. Responses
can be exchanged with peers and discussed or handed in to you for your
comments.
Here is an excerpt from a student's critical summary of
a frequency distribution table:
33% of students surveyed decided to go to college to receive a better
education and 36% decided to go in hopes of getting a better job. Speculation:
Perhaps the percentages are higher because students surveyed were juniors
& seniors; others had already been filtered out of the university
system. Students with goals and plans prior to entering college seem
to have a better chance of sticking through the required amount of time
to graduate. Other possible contributing factors: What about ages of
students? Marital status? Immigrant students on visas intent on securing
a job? Socioeconomic level of parents?
- Compare / contrast perspectives
"I wasn't sure what I should do when I was reading and the author
was against what I was trying to say. I could either ignore it or refute
it, but which is right?" --- Psychology major, University of Hawaii-Manoa
In Engaging Ideas, John C. Bean urges instructors to help students see
that texts convey messages with specific purposes for particular audiences.
You can accomplish this by comparing articles for different audiences
or comparing articles with contrasting perspectives on the same subject.
Have students read several articles on a topic and answer these questions
for each one:
- Before
I read this text, the author assumed that I believed ___________.
- After
reading this text, the author wanted me to believe _____________.
- The
author was/was not successful in changing my views because . . .
- Help
students to evaluate their readings
Inexperienced students sometimes attach equal weight to everything they
read because "it was published." Offer guidance to help students
evaluate readings: What do you know about the author's background? Do
you know anything about his or her biases? When was the material published
and in response to what other publications? Does the author define terms?
Does the author support assertions? What evidence does the author use
to test or support his or her hypothesis? How do this author's conclusions
match the conclusions of other authors I've read? Many of these questions
are covered in the "Evaluating" unit of the UWill
online tutorial, Research
101.
Challenge
#3: Composing the report or argument
WHY STUDENTS HAVE PROBLEMS
WHEN DRAFTING
Students don't know:
- What
information or data to include and what to leave out;
- When
to quote and when to paraphrase;
- How
to weave information or data into their text;
- What
format to use.
WAYS TO HELP STUDENTS WHILE THEY DRAFT
-
Give early feedback
Students tell us that they usually get extensive feedback from their
teachers only after they've committed one or more serious errors, often
when it's too late to correct them. Better: promote preventive research-process
maintenance. Like a physician, encourage your students to have frequent
check-ups: require them to submit a research prospectus, an annotated
bibliography, critical summaries, an early draft, or sections of long
reports for your feedback when it can be most effective.
- Point
out connections with writing tasks in other fields
Connect the present task with writing tasks that students may have experienced
in other fields. For example, the "literature review" is a
summary of relevant research findings. An "executive summary"
is in many ways an extended abstract.
- Do
"rhetorical analysis"
Students often have trouble getting a sense of the overall shape of
their report. A large part of this difficulty is being unclear about
the rhetorical context the stance they will assume, the purposes and
audiences for the writing. Students can ask themselves these questions:
- What
is the message I want to convey?
- What's
the purpose of writing this report? What impact do I want to have
on my readers?
- Who
are my readers? What do they already know about my subject? What
do they expect me to say?
- What
stance do I assume? Should I analyze critically? Review a controversy?
Analyze a controversy? Synthesize current thinking on an issue?
-
Explain purposes for report structure and conventions
Students who write technical research reports in engineering, physical,
and social sciences need to understand the purposes for the structure,
content, and stylistic conventions of each section of the typical report.
Using published articles, distinguish for students parts of the report
and the specific kinds of information covered in each part.
- Show
how professionals use citations
Students often think that learning how to cite sources properly is the
most important research skill---often because instructors provide more
handouts on how to format citations than they do on how to analyze texts.
Help students understand how citations function as parts of an argument
by reviewing sample research articles or by explaining how you used
quotations, paraphrases, summaries, and bibliographical citations in
your own writing.
CAPITALIZING ON YOUR ROLE AS AN EXPERT RESEARCHER
The research process is an invigorating process that
can lead to discovery and new knowledge. However, unless you help your
students move from their preconceived notions of research to a working
knowledge of processes that constitute inquiry in your field, their research
assignments will remain missed opportunities for new learning. By guiding
your students as apprentice researchers and writers, you will help your
students to gradually master the challenges of writing research projects.
Other resources
Ideas
for library/information assignments
From Memorial University Libraries, Newfoundland
Undergraduate Students and Research
How students read writing assignments and what writing instructors have discovered.
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