Librarians on Student Research

Librarians Discuss Teaching Research Skills

https://style.mla.org/undergraduate-research-literature/ Published 22 April 2019

• Elizabeth Brookbank is associate professor and instruction librarian at Western Oregon University.
• Faye Christenberry is comparative literature and philosophy librarian at the University of Washington.

Informal Research That People Do Daily Versus Research for College Assignments

There are things that are the same and things that are very different. Anyone can find plenty of information about almost any topic by doing a quick Internet search. The key difference for college-level assignments is in the level of evaluation required and in the kind of information that is used. Students must learn to evaluate sources, to look at all sources with a critical eye and differentiate between bad information—information that is manipulative, misleading, or just flat-out false—and good information. In the current climate in our country, this piece of the research process often gets the most attention.

            Just as important—and perhaps more important—for college students, however, is assessing what purpose different kinds of information serve. The top results from an Internet search tend to be for Web sites like Wikipedia, which is, after all, an encyclopedia and is great for getting general background information. But the goal of an encyclopedia or any such general reference resource is to provide basic factual information on a variety of topics. Encyclopedias do not engage in scholarship, which is generally what college instructors are expecting students to use in their research papers. In literature, this scholarship is literary criticism, the goal of which is to analyze or interpret a piece of literature. Scholarship looks slightly different in different academic disciplines, but the key is that scholarly books and articles report on the research, interpretations, and theories of scholars. Therefore, distinguishing between the information that students generally find online and the information they’re expected to use for most college assignments is not as simple as saying, “Wikipedia is bad and scholarship is good.” What matters is the type of information and a student’s purpose in using it.

            Once students understand that the type of information they are seeking in their academic research is different—and why it is different—from general online sources, it becomes clearer why everyday Web searching and academic research differ. Although students will be able to find some scholarly books and articles online, it benefits them to use library databases to find these sources for various reasons, including that this information is not usually available for free online. Students are already paying to access scholarly sources through their college or university library, so they should certainly not pay for it again!

Students’ Familiarity with Digital Resources

A fallacy about traditionally college-aged students today is that simply because they are computer-literate or know how to use various pieces of technology (like their phones), they are information-literate. One of the biggest challenges for teachers and librarians is making students aware that not all information is available online and that online information is often not the kind of information they need for their college-level research assignments. Again, most of the scholarly information available online that does fit the bill for their college assignments is not free. The key to being a successful researcher is knowing what types of resources are needed for an assignment, which ones can be found online and which elsewhere, and how to tell the difference between various kinds of information. These are all learned skills—ones that not all students have before they come to college but that assignments will help them acquire.

Research As a Conversation

In her recent Style Center post on making the transition from high school to college research, Alice Yang, an undergraduate student, writes,  “In my papers, I view my secondary sources as a medium that allows me to converse with their authors.” It is important for students to learn that scholarship is a conversation because this is certainly how their professors and instructors see it and how the authors of the books and articles the students are reading see it.

From the beginning, scholars have used articles and books to communicate with one another about their discoveries, theories, results, and so on. Likewise, when they’re in the classroom, students are learning how to be scholars in the subject matter of the class. Research papers are meant not only to help students learn about the scholarly conversation around their topic or the work they’re studying but also to give them practice joining it. The more that students view research papers as a way for them to engage in the scholarly conversation rather than to say what they already think and simply support their idea with three to five articles, the more successful they will be in their classes. To successfully join a scholarly conversation, though, students must acquire the necessary research skills to find where it is happening. Research papers help students to learn those skills and to think critically about all the information encountered during the research process.

Critical Thinking and Research

Good research skills are key to being able to think critically about information—all information, not just information in an academic context. Anyone can type a few terms into the Google search box and find some information about a topic, but is that information is factual or from a reputable source? How can a reader tell what type of information it is—whether it’s a press release, an advertisement, a magazine article, a professional report, or something else? How is it possible to tell where the information came from?

Being a good researcher means analyzing everything and being able to think critically about it: thinking about what type of information is needed, figuring out the best place to begin looking for that type of information, looking closely at every source—whether it’s a book, a video, a Web site, or other material—and knowing how to break down key elements to determine credibility and meaning. Perhaps most important, a good researcher knows to ask questions: “Who is the author? Who is the target audience? What do I know about the publication?” Learning to do research in an academic context using library resources trains students to do this type of thinking automatically and in this way is useful to them whether they’re doing a class assignment or seeking information for a personal need.