The understanding gap

To describe the most common method for research processes instruction within the majority of universities, we would have to use the term “short-term remedial.” Hosts of academic librarians perform single one-hour sessions (colloquially referred to as “one-shots”) of library orientation that are either generic or subject-specific, the latter often related to upcoming assignments. Librarians explain to students what they should know how to do, and sometimes those students get a chance to practice their basic skills. Any notion of sophisticated, comprehensive education is precluded, much as it would be if you were assuming that your adolescent son or daughter was competent to drive an automobile after 40 minutes of explanation and 15 minutes of practice.

Though we are dealing, in the teaching of research processes, with a complex and challenging set of understandings and skills that require much instruction and practice to develop to the point of sophistication, the response of academia to this point has been to make it a remedial issue. This indicates a misunderstanding of the nature of the challenge and, indeed, of the complexity of research processes.

Even librarians, who regularly see the great gap in information literacy exhibited by most university students, have been slow to acknowledge the full scope of what is required in teaching research processes. They have been so used to teaching people how to use libraries (thus thinking of information literacy “library instruction”) that they have failed to grasp that library instruction per se is not the point.

Information literacy is about understanding information and how it works. It is about introducing students to the forms of information available to them, and then helping them determine the nature of the information they need for any specific context, how to find it, how to evaluate it, and how to use it effectively and ethically. To equate this with teaching students how to use a library is as short-sighted as assuming that driving a car simply requires that a person needs to know how to use a steering wheel.

To illustrate, imagine that a student wants to do research on the effect of the world economic crisis of 2008 + on federal government regulation of American banking. A library instruction approach would point the student to the library catalog (perhaps with some suggestions for subject headings), to the journal databases and perhaps to government documents. The student, bewildered by the alien world of academic and professional information in general, would then muddle through “research,” never really understanding what she or he was dealing with.

An information literacy (research processes) approach would begin by guiding the student to formulate the research goal clearly. For example, the student might create a question such as this: “To what extent was the US government negligent in not preventing the economic crisis of 2008 + ?” Armed with a clear goal, the information literacy instructor would then help the student to assess the various information sources that might provide good material.

Books for this topic might be of some value, but the short time lag between events and studied commentary on them may limit the number of useful titles. Journals would be a good choice, but what kinds of journals in what subject areas? The student would need guidance regarding the best ways to adapt journal database searches to the problem being addressed (rather than just learning the various search features). Further, for this topic, the Google-searchable Internet is liable to be full of contradictory unsubstantiated opinion on this topic, but various government websites and Google searches for updated banking regulations might be more useful. Best would be incisive analysis by independent financial experts who have no particular biases to support. An information literacy approach indeed might not even in every case take the student to a library as such.

To assume that we can meet all the needs demanded by research processes with a library tour or an hour of instruction is to misunderstand utterly what those needs are. Research instruction is not a remedial topic but a whole way of thinking about information and its use. To miss this point is to relegate student skill and understanding to the back burner.

Students themselves, unfortunately, tend to believe that there is little to be learned in order to become adept at research processes. As Head and Eisenberg put it:

The challenge of developing skilled student researchers is thus a complex one, demanding that they acquire knowledge of information typology, problem identification, and research methods, as well as information acquisition, evaluation and effective application. The historical connection between bibliographic instruction (library instruction) and information literacy has unfortunately led to the situation in which those who attempt to teach research processes are predominantly given only one or two hours with students to accomplish their instructional goals, as if an introduction to the library were sufficient.

This creates a damaging circular argument – if teaching research skills is primarily done through one-shot sessions, then it must be a remedial task and easily accomplished within the time allotted, otherwise more time would be devoted to it. But, because we devote so little time to it, the assumption of faculty is that the one-shot instruction pattern is sufficient and that little more can be done to improve student abilities through further education. Faculty hear our technical term “information literacy” and assume a short orientation period that teaches students how to use a library and search databases (Webber and Johnston, 2006; Andretta et al., 2008). The result is just what faculty members currently believe – students normally do just muddle through their research and perform with minimal skill. Nothing more, apparently, can be expected, though some improvement will surely come (we hope, though with no real evidence to support it) as students gain more experience.

The reality is that genuine research process abilities are developed by students by the same means that many other knowledge-based skills develop – from a combination of instruction and practice over a significant period of time. The teaching of research processes is a challenging discipline involving effort closer to learning a new language than to learning how to read a spreadsheet. Yet it is both possible and feasible, if we work at it, to develop student research skills to a significant level, something that few academics seem currently to believe, having not experienced it in person.

Thus, a crucial reason why research instruction does not have a significant place in academia is the fact that it is misunderstood and underestimated. If there are few opportunities to watch students become skilled researchers, academics will assume that it cannot be done, that students just do not do research well and cannot be taught how to handle information skillfully except perhaps at the graduate level. And, since most students complete their programs of study anyway, even without sophisticated information skills, we assume that somehow they have turned out all right.

The university administration gap

Webber and Johnston (2006), in a British study of key stakeholders within universities, found minimal understanding of information literacy among academic administrators. While there was some discussion about information skills, administrators confused information literacy with computer literacy. “Information literacy” as a term did not appear in university documents, and it found no place in marketing the university. When dealing with the library, administrators were more interested in holdings and in quantification of transactions (how many books were borrowed, etc.) than the education of users. No administrative committee in the Webber and Johnston study believed that its mandate included fostering research processes ability.

Thus, even if librarians or faculty members were to propose a research processes instruction program, the possibility of getting such a program into the realm of approval and funding would be limited. The concept represented by terminology like “information literacy” or even “ability with research processes,” fuzzy to many faculty, appears alien to most university administrators. This problem is echoed by policymakers in society in general. A European workshop on information literacy (“Conclusions and Recommendations to UNESCO and CEI,” 2006) concluded:

The silo problem

In the summer of 2008, I made a list of the 32 most highly regarded journals related to higher education teaching and administration, searching their contents as far back as possible for the term “information literacy.” The results were astounding. Of the 32 journals searched, 17 had no reference to information literacy throughout their life-spans, 5 had one reference, 3 had two references, 3 had four to six references and only 4 had more than six references. These searches were done over multiple years and covered multiple volumes of each journal.

To argue that over half of the best regarded journals in higher education today had never once made reference to information literacy may not tell the whole tale. There are, no doubt, many articles in these journals that deal with critical thinking and student research ability, terminology which at least contains elements of information literacy. Yet the reality remains that these findings demonstrate that there is very little crossover between the information literacy literature, developed to a sophisticated level by academic librarians, and higher education. While the term “information literacy” is sometimes criticized, even by its advocates, it is indeed the technical descriptor for this growing area of study and teaching. To have the term, therefore, appear in so few higher education journals says that the considerable information literacy literature found in books and journals within the library and information studies world is not being recognized by scholars in higher education.

Christine Bruce, commenting on information literacy discourse, writes:

Despite the years that have followed this article, her words still remain true today.

The perpetuated experience (osmosis) gap

Many faculty members have either forgotten their own process of information literacy development (Leckie, 1996, pp. 202–3) or remember it rather triumphantly, because they were always smarter and better at research than most of their fellow students. Either way, almost all faculty members learned whatever research abilities they possess by a process of trial and error and now have little memory of what it meant to be a neophyte student researcher.

Speaking from over 25 years of personal experience, and supported by multiple studies, this author would assert that a large number of graduate students, even of doctoral students, continue to struggle to pick up skills necessary for their thesis and dissertation research, the keener of them often depending heavily on librarians. To be even more brutally honest, many of these students have an uncanny ability to optimize highly inefficient research methods and somehow pull together a decent dissertation by sheer brilliance alone despite shabby skills. These students then take up professorial roles, never having learned how to navigate a journal database with skill, use controlled vocabularies to advantage, or even take on advanced features in a library catalog.

To get where they are, faculty members have often learned information research on their own, with minimal guidance. They somehow made it through, and learning to do research by doing research is the only training method they know. Is it, in fact, possible to teach people how to develop research abilities? It is indeed possible, but most faculty members have never actually seen it done and are not especially interested in attempting it themselves.

Leckie discussed the “expert researcher” model inhabited by faculty members. Professional academics work within narrow fields in which they have a strong understanding of their literature. For many of them, keeping up with a few journals and staying in contact with colleagues is more useful than doing the kinds of research performed by their students, who know little about the field they are studying and thus must cast a wider net to find relevant material for research projects. Leckie concludes, “The expert researcher simply cannot imagine (or refuses to think about) the continuum of problems that undergraduates have in using even a moderately-sized academic library” (ibid., p. 206).

Leckie and Fullerton (1999a) found that faculty members generally believe that students’ research abilities improve over time. While professors have a weak understanding of how this occurs, they tend to think that students learn research skills on their own or consult librarians for instruction. The writers commented:

Bury (2011) has provided more recent corroboration that faculty at York University, Canada, believe students improve their research processes ability on their own over time. Though these faculty members saw some value in instruction, they were not giving priority to opportunities for such instruction.

Webber and Johnston’s (2006) study of 80 professional academics in Britain found that most of them could not define “information literacy.” Further, university faculty members believed that students really are picking up research skills, though these professors did not discuss such skills to any great extent with students and had little notion of what libraries were teaching.

McGuiness (2006) reported similar findings from a set of extensive faculty interviews. Professors generally believed that students absorb research skills by doing research and that advanced skill development comes out of student motivation and innate ability rather than instruction. Gaps in ability with research processes were blamed on the students. If they wanted such skills, they would get them. These same faculty members, however, were unable to articulate the process by which research skills were developed and had only a vague notion of the actual world of the average student doing research. McGuiness pointed out the resulting paradox. Students know they are unlikely to be graded directly on their research skills because faculty do not believe that student skills will improve to any great measure, so they do minimal work. But professors, thinking that research skills are to be learned by students on their own, fail to provide instruction or assignments intended to develop research ability.

Weetman (2005), in a study of academic faculty at De Montfort University, UK, found that over 90 percent believed that students, once they had completed their higher education programs, would have become information-literate to the level demanded by standards such as those of the Association of College and Research Libraries and SCONUL. Yet these faculty members could point to few activities in their classes intended either to teach or assess information and research skills, especially those related to acquiring information.

Information literacy by osmosis thus remains an untested belief, scarcely more than a hopeful assumption. Most research of student information literacy demonstrates that it does not happen or that gains in ability without training are minimal. Students, without significant instruction, do not learn to do research well simply by doing research.

Faulty assumptions about students and technology

Oblinger and Hawkins point out a reality that has long been observed by librarians: “Whereas colleges and universities often focus on technology skills, it is actually information literacy that should be the concern. Information literacy is much more than knowing how to open a Web browser and type a search term into Google” (2006, p. 12). It is quite amazing, in fact, to read the numerous studies, reports and educational plans built around “harnessing technology for education,” and then to observe how few of these publications ever mention information literacy or even describe its components.

The myth that technological ability equals information and research ability seems to have convinced the best minds in educational thinking today (Jenson, 2004). As large numbers of studies have demonstrated, however, our highly technological students continue to fail miserably at most aspects of sophisticated information handling.

This problem, in fact, may be both deeper and more subtle than simply constituting a false mythology. The fact is that much technology used by professors in today’s higher education environment is sporadic, and decidedly “old school” in a world in which Facebook and text messaging are the technological landmarks of our students and PowerPoint is a Dark Ages application. Academia’s version of technology is often very much behind the times. Selwyn (2007) points out that the emphasis on making our students technologically literate with academic tools that they find anachronistic both limits their creative use of information technology and actually leads them to boycott or opt out of academic information technology entirely.

A study by Grant, Malloy and Murphy (2009) has demonstrated that student ability with even basic computing software, such as word processors and spreadsheets, is less sophisticated than we, or students themselves, believe. But, even if we were to grant that university students have a sound knowledge of the latest technology, this does not necessarily mean that they will be good researchers. Head, in a study of students at a small liberal arts college, concludes:

The recent trend among professors, in their own research, to use Web tools like Google Scholar in preference to more complex but also more sophisticated library databases is not helping matters (Housewright and Schonfeld, 2008). There seems to be a general assumption among many academics that information is becoming more accessible and that search tools are easier to use. This may be true in one sense, in that a search engine like Google Scholar demands little knowledge of search techniques. But such tools produce very large result sets comprising a confusing number of types of academic literature. The illusion of ease and effectiveness thus becomes simply that – an illusion – when one considers that the end product is both mystifying and much less precise than resources found through a subscribed library database. Falsely assuming that Google Scholar is simple and sufficient may make academics less inclined to teach students how to use an EBSCO or Gale database.

Faculty culture

The information literacy movement and the major initiatives for teaching research processes in universities have come primarily from academic libraries and library organizations (though organizations like UNESCO have also been strong supporters). The idea of putting research processes education into the curriculum has not been supported at all strongly by teaching professors in the various disciplines.

Bennett, discussing the work of those who promote information literacy within academia wrote: “Their advocacy often encounters a campus environment that, although rarely hostile, is often uniformed, indifferent, or occupied with other priorities” (2007, p. 148). If information literacy is as important as its advocates assert, why then does it receive so little notice among teaching faculty? One answer may well be faculty culture.

Faculty members in theory are interested in improving their students’ research abilities, but study after study demonstrates that they are not inclined to sacrifice classroom time to do so (Cannon, 1994; Leckie and Fullerton, 1999a; Hrycaj and Russo, 2007; Bury, 2011). As Webber and Johnston (2006), in a study of 80 academics, argued:

The value of Larry Hardesty’s (1995) study of faculty culture to this issue can scarcely be overestimated. Hardesty demonstrated that at the heart of librarian-faculty mutual misunderstanding (and thus struggles with getting information literacy onto the academic agenda) is the interplay of two distinct cultures. Whereas librarians typify a “managerial culture” of goals, collegiality and a concern for the broader educational requirements of the student, faculty culture emphasizes “research, content and specialization,” with a “de-emphasis on teaching, process and undergraduates.” The supreme value among faculty members is professional autonomy, whose corollary is academic freedom. Professors, as well, according to Hardesty, typically face a chronic shortage of time to fulfill their tasks and are resistant to change. Librarians, seeking to meet broad student informational needs and help professors develop skills that go beyond the bounds of any particular subject discipline, are thus viewed by faculty members as intruders.

Baker pointed out what may well be a related complication of faculty culture – the fact that faculty within discipline-related focus groups studying goals for information literacy assignments tended not to see the issue in terms of broader skills for lifelong learning and the marketplace, but framed “the student library assignment decision around narrower and more directly impactive pedagogical and educational questions, such as familiarity with the literature in a specific discipline” (1997, p. 177). That is, faculty members think in terms of content, and specifically content within their own disciplines, rather than in terms of process and skill development that can be transferable to a wider range of subjects.

Leckie and Fullerton (1999b) used the language of pedagogical discourse to explain the distinctiveness of faculty and librarian perceptions of their roles. Their conclusion was:

These researchers further pointed out that faculty pedagogy seeks to maintain control of the classroom, thus making it difficult for librarians to encroach into faculty-held territory.

Another element of faculty culture that helps ensure that research processes education does not achieve prominence in the curriculum comes from the way in which experts do research. The linear conceptions of thesis/question development, research in books, then in journals, and so on, that are part of information literacy instruction are relatively foreign to expert researchers. Stoan (1991) summarized a significant number of studies showing that expert researchers rely upon citation gleaning, reading of current journals, and interaction with colleagues for the majority of their research information. What is more, experts follow a distinctly non-linear path in doing informational research, drawing information and ideas from a wide variety of sources, all the while revising and rethinking until the project is completed. The notion of an informational research “method” is thus foreign to many professors, who would be unable to articulate one, since their research patterns change from project to project.

If faculty, indeed, do research in non-linear ways, it is not surprising that offers by librarians to help faculty members teach their students better research methods can tend to fall on deaf or resistant ears. Research among subject experts is not a linear process that can be taught. You simply get in there and shape a research project or literature review by whatever means you have available. There is no consistent method.

Students, on the other hand, lacking the knowledge content and discourse expertise of their professors, require exactly what their professors reject – a set of steps or strategies to make sense of their research problems, identify and acquire needed data in several formats, compile and evaluate the data and organize it into a final project. Without the support of a knowledge base and years of experience in working with it, students lack the basic skills and understanding needed to avoid floundering.

Kempcke (2002) argued that things may have changed since Hardesty. Many institutions are re-evaluating core curriculum, and the ACRL “Competency Standards for Higher Education” have put pressure on academia to take information literacy seriously. That might one day actually be the case, but there appears to be little evidence in the current higher educational literature of any movement toward a generalized embrace of information literacy by academics.

Is faculty culture an obstacle to ensuring that students become information-literate? Faculty would certainly deny any such accusation, arguing that their work of teaching the content and critical thinking skills inherent to their disciplines is information literacy at its best. Information literacy, however, as defined by those who have set standards for it, is anchored, not just in content with a little critical thinking thrown in, but in process. Librarians, who generally focus more on process, find themselves hard-pressed to convince faculty that knowledge of content (and even ability to think critically within content) is insufficient to make most people truly information-literate (Badke, 2005).

This is supported by Sterngold (2008), himself a faculty member who has worked cooperatively with an academic librarian to deliver research processes instruction in marketing courses. Sterngold argues that librarians should tone down their rhetoric about information literacy, simplify their definitions to terms that faculty can understand, and give up their teaching role in favor of serving as consultants to faculty, who would do the information literacy instruction. At the same time, he admits that, “Many faculty members remain apathetic and uniformed about IL” (ibid., p. 86). As well, “Most faculty members are preoccupied with covering as much subject matter as possible in their courses, and they are not interested in devoting any more time to developing students’ information competencies” (ibid., p. 87). One wonders, then, how faculty would ever be motivated to teach information literacy themselves, as Sterngold prefers. A similar lack of priority given by faculty to teaching research processes was found in Bury’s (2011) study at York University, Canada.

Faculty perception of librarians

Faculty members do not generally see librarians as full academic colleagues and thus have little appreciation for librarians as instructors (Saunders, 2009). This perception arises from the fact that librarians often have terminal Master’s degrees, have limited teaching experience, and tend not to publish as much as do classroom faculty (McGuinness, 2006, p. 575).

Many professors have not understood, however, the extent to which technology has changed both student culture and the information environment, territories which are common ground to librarians. Perhaps, out of a failure to put themselves and their skills forward, librarians, in turn, have not been able to demonstrate their amazing knowledge of and ability with information literacy pedagogy in a highly technologized setting. This is less a content-oriented competency (though there is content, to be sure) than a facility with handling information in its new environment and passing that facility along to students. Not having been given the chance to do much more than one-shot instruction sessions, many librarians have yet to demonstrate what they could offer if research processes instruction were given its due within the curriculum.

The hesitation of accrediting bodies

The following discussion relates more to the American situation where higher education institutions are accredited using accrediting agencies sanctioned by the federal government, than it may to other countries that have other ways of determining educational quality. For other countries, what follows, however, is still instructive in that it shows how seldom those who set the educational standards for our institutions actually take research processes instruction seriously.

Of the six major accrediting bodies for higher education in the United States, only one – the Middle States Commission on Higher Education – has given significant emphasis to information literacy. All of the others mention it only briefly if, indeed, they use the term “information literacy” at all in their standards statements.

We might wonder why this is the case, if information literacy has indeed been endorsed by the significant library associations and any number of higher education associations that are well accepted within academia. Accrediting bodies do, after all, have the authority to compel the meeting of standards, do they not?

The fact is that accreditation is something more of a dance than an exercise of dictatorship. Accrediting bodies, while monopolies for their constituencies, know that keeping a distinction between what is doable and what may not be is in their best interests. These bodies, in turn, are responsible to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Postsecondary Education for their own recognition as viable agencies, so that draconian requirements may well put them in jeopardy.

Still, the Middle States Commission has been able to produce extremely valuable resources and guidelines for its institutions without creating a riot of discontent (Middle States Commission on Higher Education, 2003, 2009), so the hesitation of the other agencies to advance the information literacy cause may well lie in areas other than fear of displeasing their constituencies.

Conclusion

We have looked at several reasons why the teaching of research processes remains a low priority in academic life. These may be summarized with one potentially dangerous all-encompassing statement: The teaching of research processes is not a priority because so few people recognize that there is a problem to address or a solution possible. It is the nature of higher education (as undoubtedly most education) to perpetuate its past successes, even when the world changes, and to fail to recognize looming threats to its future.

The rise of information technology has created a new informational order as dramatically different from the old one as was the era of hand-copied manuscripts from that of the printing press. When the need for skills to link the right information to the right situation becomes as recognized as it should be, we can only hope that academia will awaken to that need and take up the means to help students navigate the new information age.

Note

This chapter is adapted from (Badke, 2011c).“Why information literacy is invisible”. Communications in Information Literacy, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 129–41. Retrieved from: http://thebrowers.net/comminfolit/indexphp?journal=cil&page=article&op=viewFile&path[]=Vol4-2010PER3&path[]=119.