Conclusion

It is tempting at this point to resort to clichéd language: “A thousand-mile journey begins with but a single step;” “A mighty fire begins with a single spark;” and so on. While these may express the message I wish to convey, they tend to trivialize the seriousness of the dilemma we are facing.

Many of our students don’t know how to do research. They are going through undergraduate and even graduate studies as outsiders looking in, rarely really being able to participate in the discourse and discovery that their professors find so familiar. These same students do not even understand the expectations found in a standard research assignment (Head, 2008) and spend most of their “researching” time simply trying to follow professorial instructions while failing to grasp the methodology and never really engaging with the subject matter.

These students fail to appreciate the diversity of information sources available to them and lack the ability to evaluate these sources for quality and relevance. Overall, they handle whatever information they are dealing with clumsily and without significant understanding of the value of peer review and academic recognition in determining the weight to give to each work. They are truly outsiders, and they will remain so through much or all of their academic programs.

These students, at some point, will graduate and enter careers in industries, business or professions, where they will continue to show their limitations in working with the information that will be the life’s blood of their occupations. In 2004, IDC, a major market intelligence organization, surveyed 600 industries in four sectors – financial services, government, manufacturing, and healthcare – to determine their costs for handling information. The resulting White Paper presented some startling statistics. For the average worker, the discovery and analysis of information, as of 2004, consumed 24 percent of working hours and cost each organization US$14,000 per worker per year. What is more, not finding needed information or having to retool or reformat existing information cost the average 1,000 employee organization over US$10,000,000 per year. The paper concludes:

Today we have business graduates who lack the information skills that business practitioners themselves declare to be crucial (Klusek and Bornstein, 2006), consultants seeking information malpractice insurance to compensate for gaps in information handling ability (Ebbinghouse, 2000), and a steady stream of “information disasters” (Pidgeon and O’Leary, 2000), resulting in exploding space shuttles (Rogers, 1986), stock price crashes based on faulty research (Ojala, 2008), and needless deaths in the course of medical research (Rogers et al., 2001; Steinbrook, 2002).

Ultimately, we must pose the following, hopefully rhetorical, question: Can we call our graduates “educated” if they lack the ability to handle with skill the information of their disciplines? If our answer is “no,” we will have to recognize that we have a significant problem on our hands. Even as information handling becomes a dominant element of daily life in the modern world, and the complexity of information is increasing exponentially, we have not yet recognized that our students lack research processes skills, let alone established workable means to address the problem.

The way forward need not tax our resources, as might, for example, our challenge with climate change. Higher education currently has the resources – personnel and finances – to teach research processes well and comprehensively. What we need is the will.

Paul Zurkowski (Zurkowsi and the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, 1974) of the Information Industry Association estimated that only one-sixth of the American population was “information literate,” that is, able to handle information to address issues and advance knowledge. His estimate is in all probability still valid today. If we live in an information age driven both by complex technology and a multitude of new types of information sources, this would appear to be simply not good enough.

Our universities are filled with confused, disengaged students looking into our disciplines from the outside and lacking an invitation to come in. We are graduating people who do not have the information-handling abilities needed to function well in their succeeding occupations. Society as a whole is questioning the value of the education we provide, and for good reason – we are using ages-old methods to tell our students about our disciplines without genuinely inviting them to learn the research processes that enable them actually to do our disciplines.

We do have a path forward. We now require the determination to travel that path.