Research processes transforming education
Abstract:
In order to develop the teaching of research processes within the university, a grassroots approach is preferable. Individual professors implement research processes instruction by using such elements as autobiography, information-based instruction, guided modular assignments, involvement of students in the professor’s own research, and options made available by new information technologies. The grassroots approach widens with departmental involvement that succeeds only if logical, emotional and situational barriers are overcome. Finally, university-wide initiatives can be started through a process of discussion among professors and departments. Such initiatives need to develop a campus-wide educational philosophy, create research and writing courses in each discipline, and put forward a comprehensive plan to meet specific research processes instruction goals through the curriculum.
Up to this point, we have identified a problem and provided some suggestions for a solution. The following chapter will take a broader look at the nature of a higher educational venture that makes research processes fundamental to education. We are seeking a new vision of education in which the handling of information with skill and understanding is the basis of all instruction and all student work.
The educational task of the professor
If you are a professor, you may be asking yourself how you could possibly implement a new vision for education in a setting in which you are tasked with delivering subject matter to students, covering a curriculum, and having students achieve acceptable grades on examinations or other assessment measures. To step out of the comfort zone of doing what we have been doing is indeed a challenge.
Let me suggest, however, that it is possible to test the waters, implementing research processes-based initiatives one at a time. Here are some key elements that can be included fairly easily and can go a long way toward achieving your traditional educational goals.
The power of autobiography
Most students are interested in who their professors are, if only to determine how difficult it will be to achieve a good grade with a particular teacher. To begin your courses with some measure of autobiography (while seeking to ensure that the same students do not hear the same story too often) will accomplish several purposes:
It will humanize you. Believe it or not, many students see their professors as another species that is unaccountably enthusiastic about the incomprehensible and distinctly lacking a real life outside of the classroom. Humanization is a positive good in that it opens the possibility and attractiveness of student entry into the professor’s discipline. When we are aloof and superior, we send the message that we intend to tell students about our disciplines but never to let them enter. This, obviously, disengages them.
It will enable you to speak more easily about the metanarrative of your discipline, about the beliefs, values and passions that drive practitioners. For students to “get” the metanarrative is crucial, because it is the metanarrative that defines the discipline, every bit as much as its method.
It will open the possibility that your students could follow your own path into the discipline. You were not always part of your discipline’s in-crowd. Helping students understand how you got there (including your joys, sorrows, victories and failures along the way) can offer hope that at least some of your students will do the same.
Autobiography still teaches content if it includes your understanding of how the discipline works, what its main passions are, and how you have been influenced by its main proponents. You have essentially, with autobiography, an open door to better reception of content.
Information-based instruction
There is a profound difference between teaching about the discipline and teaching through the literature of the discipline. Teaching through the literature means that students get to study the actual materials that form the basis of research processes. In a history course, for example, you could teach the events surrounding the beginning of the First World War by going over with students the actual documents issued by various parties (as found, for example, at http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/1914.htm). Your analysis would include not merely content but the method used in determining the beliefs, prejudices, propaganda, and so on that lie behind the documents. If historical study requires the interpretation of primary sources, you can demonstrate both the metanarrative of the study of European history and the methods used to do that discipline.
For the social sciences and sciences, close reading of key literature reviews can foster both content and an understanding of research processes. Such close reading helps students to understand the way scholars express their approach to the discipline, the sorts of discourse and debate that work to advance the topic at hand, and the very structure and purpose of a good review. You can trace the development of theories, advancement of scientific knowledge through experimentation, and so on, simply relying on the literature itself to point the way.
In all disciplines, while textbooks can be helpful, and the best of them incorporate some direct use of the literature of the discipline, they tend to be secondary overall, teaching about the discipline rather than inviting students to work within it. Studying a discipline’s direct literature can help students learn the nature of the information base they are to work with, the metanarratives that guide each discipline, the methods used, and the views of the major scholars who define the state of the art. A process of using more primary materials and fewer secondary ones will not necessarily disrupt the traditional educational goals if done carefully, but it will help students to become research process insiders much more quickly than if they are simply told about the subject matter from the distance of secondary study.
Guided, modular assignments
We have seen that many students struggle with understanding the expectations of their professors, no matter how carefully those professors try to explain what they require. A corrective to this problem, and a means to develop student researchers in an intentional way, is to assign research projects which both approximate real research in the discipline and offer opportunity for professorial feedback and resubmission of revised work.
Two barriers to this approach to assignments are immediately apparent. First, students who must resubmit work will balk at the extra effort required. This problem can be overcome by stating the resubmission requirement from the outset or possibly even limiting the number of research projects in order to allow for resubmission to be done within normal student workloads. Second, this approach is labor-intensive for the professor, who not only has several assignment modules to grade rather than just one, but who will need to be more expansive in assessment comments and will need to similarly grade resubmissions. I am not sure I have a good answer to this except to ask: Is the professor’s task to disseminate information or foster student learning? If the latter, we are going to have to get used to providing much more feedback on student work so that students not only understand requirements clearly but are enabled to do the work of disciplinarians, producing results that stand up to the rigor demanded by each discipline.
Modules – such as development of a research question or thesis/hypothesis, determination of the information required, acquisition of relevant literature, evaluation of that literature for relevance and quality, and writing of the final project – will not succeed in enhancing research processes unless both instructions and grading foster the work of developing student researchers. Thus instruction on creating research questions or theses/hypotheses should include good examples or at least helpful guidelines. Feedback should point out reasons for inadequacies (research statements are too open-ended, vague, using information as a goal rather than a tool, not capable of being addressed with evidence, etc.) and reasons why a good research statement works (states a clearly focused research problem that demands rigorous analysis of data in order to address the issue, etc.). With every module you must give as much attention to the student’s method and information-handling ability as you do to the content on the page.
Once again, though possibly self-serving on my part, may I suggest strongly that academic librarians can be of tremendous help, both in providing consultation on the design of assignment modules and in suggesting ways to assess student work. Librarians should also be brought into the classroom to help students understand the nature of the literature in the discipline and the expert use of today’s complex information databases. More on this shortly.
Involving students in your own research
While the actual direct involvement of students in their professors’ research is limited by logistics (you can only take on so many helpers) and generally confined to graduate study, introducing students to your own work in process is a significant way to help them see the discipline in action. Whether you have them summarize some of your publications, or critique them (I’ve done the latter and found it painful but constructive), engaging students in this way invites them in more definitely than do many other efforts.
Small beginnings, larger ends
Once you are able to demonstrate to yourself and hopefully to your superiors that such research-based initiatives both meet traditional educational goals and engage students more deeply, you can hopefully develop further the means to teach research processes even as you are teaching content. Here are some ideas:
Wikipedia encourages the creation and editing of articles as university course assignments (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects). With clear advice and guidelines available, students can produce or revise Wikipedia articles under the guidance of a professor. Tracking the external edits of created articles can provide students with sound (and perhaps sobering) feedback on the principles and practices expected of those researching within the discipline.
There are numerous Web 2.0 options for the development of research projects – wikis, threaded discussions, blogs with feedback, incorporation of videos and animations, and so on – which can enable students to do “works in process,” thus building their skills as individuals or within groups. The key is to keep them researching, writing and continuously receiving feedback, followed by resubmission. We are often so keen on viewing the final product that we miss opportunities to use process to refine student skills. Web 2.0 is filled with process tools to do the latter. For more on use of Web 2.0 in teaching research processes, see Hicks and Graber (2010).
Begin thinking through all the courses you teach. Is it possible for you to establish research processes development goals for each course so that, as much as it is in your hands, there is a progression of experiences from basic, initial levels to more sophisticated opportunities as students move from lower to upper years? With such a plan in place, and assessment data to show that students are indeed developing as researchers, you will be in a strong position to justify placing research processes development at the foundation of your teaching. You will also have data to help persuade your colleagues to attempt the same in their courses.
Assess your instruction in research processes. Beyond your own grading of student assignments, there are numerous research pretests and post-tests available (do an Internet search on < information literacy pretest >) as well as professional tests of research ability such as Project Sails (https://www.projectsails.org/), iSkills (http://www.ets.org/iskills/about), and Information Literacy Test (http://www.madisonassessment.com/assessment-testing/information-literacy-test/). RAILS (Rubric Assessment of Information Literacy Skills) provides numerous rubrics for all aspects of research processes (http://www.railsontrack.info/). Your assessment will provide data that enables you to speak with authority about the effectiveness of your work in developing student researchers. For more on assessment techniques in research processes instruction, see Oakleaf (2009) and Oakleaf and Kaske (2009).
Departmental planning for teaching research processes
A single lonely professor actively teaching research processes can become a pathetic object of amusement and/or scorn if there is no departmental support. Questions arise as to whether or not content is being covered, and the professor may be told that research skills cannot be taught but must be learned by students doing research on their own. Thus, enlisting departmental support is crucial to furthering the teaching of research processes in the institution.
There are significant barriers, however, the predominant one being that most academics do not see that there is a problem to be solved. Students are poor researchers, to be sure, but we already have the best that we can hope for. In general, there are few models for advancing student research skills beyond giving more assignments and trying to motivate our students to take them seriously.
How does a professor, charged up by a new experience of actually teaching research processes as a foundational element of courses, overcome departmental barriers to expanding such instruction? Here, an extremely helpful book – Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Heath and Heath, 2010) – may provide a solution. The authors argue that difficult change must address the logical, emotional and situational factors that stand in the way.
The logical barrier is the one with which we are most familiar. People are not convinced that research processes can be taught or should be given priority. This barrier is overcome by providing a logically convincing argument. You need a persuasive way to explain to departmental members the specific steps you took (autobiography, a focus on the nature of information sources and metanarrative of the discipline, staged and guided research assignments, and so on) and show evidence that you are meeting your goals (which are generally also departmental goals) – creating competent researchers who can state a research problem, determine information sources needed to address it, find those sources, evaluate them and apply them to the problem at hand.
The emotional aspect of change focuses on what Heath and Heath call “finding the feeling.” In the case of research processes, “the feeling” is that lecture methods are not working as well as we had hoped and that students are disengaged, showing little interest in involving themselves deeply with the discipline, nor having any real ability to do so. Their use of information and their ability to do significant research are lacking, so much so that many professors have “dumbed down” their requirements. We wanted critical thinkers and genuine interest in the subject matter, but we so often get what looks like apathy and indifference. Amazingly, students, who are paying for their education (or their parents are), demonstrate a profound disinterest in actually being educated. Many of them see themselves as simply paying for a diploma.
This generates a strong emotional sense of dread that we, as educators, are not succeeding. Perceived failure is a great motivator to seeking new ways to do things, but ongoing failure, according to Heath and Heath, creates a general sense of exhaustion, a belief that there is nothing we can do to change things or that the effort we would have to make to bring about significant change is just too much.
To overcome this inertia, we need to break the change needed down into smaller components. We could, for example, tell our fellow departmental members about the power of autobiography to get students interested in our subject matter. We could show how staging an assignment is something many are already doing but that, if we made each stage an opportunity to guide students in proper research procedure, we would go a long way toward teaching research processes.
A large factor in emotional buy-in to change is creating a community of like-minded people. Establishing such a community is furthered by your demonstrated success. If you as a professor show your colleagues that your students are now beginning to use their critical faculties more, are actually showing interest in the discipline, and are becoming a joy to teach, you will have strong buy-in. Aren’t these exactly the sorts of things all of us as educators are looking for? If there is a way to achieve such goals, we’re in.
Yet there are still situational challenges. We’ve never done this before. It’s a lot of work to change our teaching methods. How do we know it will work? Will we be able to prove to our colleagues and administrators that we are still pursuing good education? Are there any intrinsic or extrinsic rewards for the effort we will need to make? Heath and Heath suggest that, in the face of situational challenges, we need to change the environment, create habits and “rally the herd.”
In the case of departmental adoption of a program of teaching research processes, may I suggest that most departments have the tools already in hand to alter the environment. These tools are the existing vision, mission and goals that define the departmental ethos. In these documents lie the best aspirations of the stakeholders – both academic administrators and faculty. To have a department go honestly over these aspiration documents and identify where goals are not being met is a significant first start. If we are not producing critical thinkers who are able to articulate the principles of the discipline and work intelligently within it, we are not producing skilled student researchers either.
Once it is recognized that goals are not being met, the work of any professor actually teaching research processes in the department is going to become a model for broader departmental change. What if departmental members were to get together and produce a further document, not a statement of goals, but an action plan to meet them, using the principles and methods of research processes instruction? Such a shared document, with concrete, achievable steps pointing the way forward, could then provide the “permission” to change. If we as a department can decide together to take active steps in all of our courses to alter our approach, then we are well down the road to teaching research processes department-wide. Such steps begin to create the habit of considering processes instruction as being every bit as integral to the foundation of education as the teaching of content (process actually often being used as a tool to teach content). And such habits, practiced together, encourage the whole “herd” of departmental personnel to further the cause.
Once again, a strong ally in furthering broader teaching of research processes will be the academic librarian. Why? Because academic librarians see the student side of the problem. They encounter, on a daily basis, all of the inadequacies of student understanding and ability. Academic librarians know the truth, while faculty members are often shielded from it by student reticence to reveal their personal research flaws to their teachers. Those flaws come out directly and often in student reference encounters with librarians. These same librarians have had decades of experience with teaching research processes, and their published literature on the topic is significant. Use them as advocates for departmental transition to foundational research processes instruction. They will be highly supportive and immensely helpful.
Yet there is the nagging question: Why should departments and their professors make the change? Higher education has weathered challenges since the Renaissance and earlier, yet we still have professors, lectures and students. Why not perpetuate what works? The answers vary from considering the profound economic and administrative changes that are attacking the tenure system (Berrett, 2011) to being alarmed by new studies that are showing that our undergraduate students do not appear to be learning anything near as much as we think they are (Arum and Roksa, 2011). But the real problem we are facing is that the technology of information has made information itself a cheap commodity while at the same time attacking, and perhaps defeating, the power of informational expertise that once came from safeguards like peer review (Badke, 2009b). Our students don’t need us if all we are going to do is disseminate information. What they actually require is our expertise, something we can only prove to them if we make the teaching of research processes foundational to instruction.
Our students are terrible information handlers both conceptually and operationally. They don’t even have nearly the technological ability we credit them for (Stone and Madigan, 2007). These gaps are large contributors to their increased disconnection from what we are teaching them. We have an opportunity to bring them in by guiding them to become skilled student researchers, thus making them growing disciplinarians and meeting all of our motherhood goals of critical thinking and skilled discourse within the subject matter. The question is not, why should we change? but what sort of death wish are we promoting by refusing to change?
University planning for teaching research processes
If you have been following the progression of this chapter, you will see that I have been arguing for a grassroots approach that begins with individual professors who in turn evangelize their departments, leading to a broader university-wide transition. As departments begin to show success in teaching research processes, the Heath and Heath (2010) methods for effecting change can enable departments to evangelize their universities.
It is not beyond the realm of possibility to create a research processes teaching university. Let me suggest some stages. First, it is vitally important that universities begin establishing philosophies of instruction that actually carry weight. The grassroots approach I’ve suggested may well be a better path to developing such policies through departmental collaboration rather than top-down fiat. A philosophy of instruction will need to acknowledge that today’s educational environment is increasingly resistant to mere information dissemination. It must, as well, admit that we have an information age without a plan to enable its inhabitants to handle information effectively. Finally, it must put research processes instruction into the foundation of all educational efforts, mandating an approach to education that intentionally makes students into disciplinarians.
The second stage is to establish research and writing courses in every major. Such courses have shown themselves well able to carry the initial development of research processes thinking in students. It might be objected that such courses may be needed in the humanities, which are writing-intensive, but not in the social sciences or sciences. I would counter-argue that the social sciences and sciences need such courses precisely because there are so few other opportunities in these disciplines to teach students how to work with information and do informational research. Even the physical sciences call for information research (literature reviews) and writing.
The third stage is to ensure that every department has a comprehensive plan to integrate the teaching of research processes into the curriculum. Here, all parties must recognize that we are not considering short-term, remedial instruction, but a comprehensive approach to a problem that is akin to teaching someone fluency in a new language. Courses must be targeted and specific strategies developed to enable students to meet specific goals (e.g. able to formulate an acceptable research problem, able to maximize advanced features in a journal database, able to distinguish types of research literature, able to evaluate found resources for quality and relevance, and so on).
What about the traditional resistance of faculty members to direction from administrators? That, indeed, can be a problem if the development of research processes instruction policies and procedures is done from above. I am advocating, however, that this whole endeavor begin with classroom professors and migrate upward. If, ultimately, some professors or departments need to be persuaded from above, the arguments of this book should serve as grist. Adopting such principles as those suggested by Heath and Heath (2010) can facilitate changes of heart and practice among those who favor traditional approaches to education.
Ultimately, we are seeking universities that believe in the power of making the teaching of research processes foundational to education. In an information age, there are multiple ways to acquire the content we teach, but most students lack the process abilities to handle the information that defines their lives. Foundational teaching of research processes is the most relevant thing we can do.
If done well, we will have much more engaged students who see themselves operating within the discipline rather than looking at it through the filter of their professors. And we will be accomplishing what surely must be a basic requirement for citizens in the information age – the ability to harness information skillfully to address the issues and challenges of our time. We are not expecting that all of our students will become researchers at the doctoral level, simply that they become informationally adept in whatever setting they find themselves.