When we ask students to write a research paper, what exactly are we asking for? During a conversation with Dr. Kist last week, it struck me there are three common ways of conceiving of a student research paper:
1. Written findings of original research (such as a middle school science fair project)
2. Book research as literature review (most high school and college papers)
3. A blending of ideas 1 and 2 above (journal articles, thesis, dissertation)
As a graduate student, when I write a research paper, I am reporting the results of an original inquiry. This contrasts from the type of research papers I wrote in high school and undergrad which were basically mediocre attempts at a literature review. Rather than being exhaustive, my high school and early college research papers typically were written using a particular number of sources quantified by the teacher.
While I was reading "Re-envisioning Research," by Gregory Shafer, in the September 1999 issue of English Journal, it struck me that my middle school teachers and graduate professors both defined research as an original inquiry/experiment. However, somewhere in the middle of the educational continuum, the idea got fixed in my head that research was reading a bunch of books and spitting them back out in proper MLA or APA format. It's the kind of kind of research Shafer describes as "a very disciplined procedure of following directions, of stoically learning form" (p. 45).
Building on the concept of Macrorie's I-Search paper, Shafer required his college undergraduates to use "the research paper as a way to solve problems that directly affected their lives" (p. 46). Once students chose a topic they were passionate about, they collected data through interviews and observations and supported their findings with statistics and books they had read for the project.
When I think back to my P-16 education, I acquired the skills I would need to conduct research as a professional. However, these skills were taught in isolation from one another. In middle school, I was an inquiry researcher. I won second place in the 6th grade science fair for my project on bread mold. I didn't consult outside sources. I just left pieces or bread all around the house for two months to see what would happen and concluded mold thrives in warm, moist environments. Mold didn't need light; it grew just as well on the windowsill as it did in the back of the bread drawer.
In middle school science, research was cool. It was based on my interests. That all changed in high school and college, though. I remember writing a paper on Edgar Lee Master's Spoon River Anthology. This involved reading the book of poetry and the works of some critics, all of which were reported in a research paper. There were rules, note cards, a few more rules, in-text citations, a bibliography page, and--you guessed it--more rules. I really didn't care about Master, and there certainly wasn't a burning question/interest that kept me up at night and made me want to read about Spoon River. In fact, conducting this "research" put me to sleep!
Research for the rest of high school, undergraduate studies, and even my master's degree was book-based, so of course, this is how I taught research to my own high school and college freshmen. Like so many teachers before me, I created another generation of students who probably hate research because it didn't address a genuine problem or interest in their lives. I could have done better than assigning research papers on the 1920s during a unit on The Great Gatsby, and all of the research papers on social issues could have been so much better if I'd asked students to conduct an interview or observations to supplement their book findings.
In teaching research skills, I think a lot of us miss the mark in a few key ways. First, real research conducted by professionals is driven by passion. When we force research topics on students (such as everyone research the biography of Shakespeare), we are creating an artifical research situation. Second, in much of P-16 schooling, research is taught as
inquiry/experimentation or literature review. When we begin to require students to consult texts and learn documentation style, we should not omit other sources of data such as observation, interview, and experimentation. Finally, students need authentic models of real-world research. Journal articles may be too high of a reading level for certain ages, but a visit from a real researcher, perhaps a professor from a local university, could provide insight about the utility of a literature review and how it informs, not replaces, original research.
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Katie, this was another interesting posting. I agree wholeheartedly with your statements about passion being a key element of research, and I would say of ALL education, which is sorely lacking. You also talk about students "choosing" their own research questions; choice is another aspect of education which seems to encourage student interest in a project, but which teachers seem afraid to include - or if they do include "choice" it's normally not real choice at all.
ReplyDeleteI liked this posting, because after writing a couple of literature reviews this semester, I've become very disillusioned with regurgitating other people's ideas - I know that we have to use others' previous work as an effective foundation for our own work, but if you're not knee-deep in conducting "actual" research, reviewing other people's ideas not only feels a little futile, but much of what we discover in the literature may not be fully synthesised because we're not immediately seeing the connection to our own active research.
The other benefit of bringing in, as you put it, "authentic models of real-world research" is that the whole research/literature review process becomes more active, and thereby more enjoyable.