Students in first-semester composition classes are routinely assigned to write a research paper, but this exercise rarely succeeds because they do not yet grasp how to analyze their sources, say the chief researchers of a multi-institutional study of college students’ citations.
“We need to be teaching analysis, and a lot of it,” Rebecca Moore Howard, professor of writing and rhetoric at Syracuse University and co-principal investigator of the Citation Project, said in an interview. She and her colleague on the project are scheduled to present their latest findings Thursday at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in St. Louis.
The project, which began as an effort to examine plagiarism and the teaching of writing, looked at source-based student papers from 16 institutions, including Ivy League universities, private and public institutions, liberal-arts colleges, religious institutions, and community colleges.
After reading 174 student papers and tracing back their 1,911 citations, the project’s researchers were able to investigate the process by which students find, evaluate, and use the sources they cite.
“It’s very clear that they don’t know how to analyze their sources,” Ms. Howard said. “They don’t understand it and don’t know how to do anything but grab a few sentences and go.”
A presentation of the project’s initial findings at the conference last year told a disheartening story: that students rarely look past the first three pages of the sources they cite and often stitch together a patchwork of text, with little evidence that they absorb their sources’ content along the way.
The presentation the researchers prepared this year added further analysis and reflected data from one more institution, the further recoding of the data, and tests of statistical validity, which it met. Significantly, the results held true across institution types, said Sandra Jamieson, co-principal investigator on the project, and professor and chair of the English department at Drew University.
There was some good news in the numbers, Ms. Jamieson said. Seventy percent of students in the study chose government documents, journals, books, or news sources to cite, which she said are the kinds of materials that librarians and teachers of composition encourage students to seek out.
While this statistic suggests that these faculty members have been successful in their efforts to teach students to more scrupulously evaluate Web sources, a closer look at how students actually used these sources proved more sobering.
Ms. Jamieson offered an example of a student who wrote a research paper on eating disorders. The student cited 10 works, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and two books. One of those books, however, was Skinny Bitch, a best-selling diet book written by a former agent for a modeling agency along with a former model who earned a master’s degree in holistic nutrition.
“This was a student who was really trying, but just fell flat when dealing with the sources,” Ms. Jamieson said.
Another of those sources was what appeared on the list of works cited to be an article from a publication called Biotech Business Week, which the student accessed through LexisNexis Academic, a portal to the Internet that would win the approval of most composition faculty and librarians.
But the citation, which was used to support the uncontroversial contention that fresh produce is good for you, was a press release written by the United Fresh Produce Association.
“The problem is that this is a site that provides secondhand data at best and with a commercial slant,” Ms. Jamieson said. “It’s the lack of critical thinking that says, ‘Wait, can I trust this source?’”
Implications for Teaching
Such an example may not surprise those who work with freshmen on their research papers, but it and the larger findings point to changes that should be made in the first-year composition course, Ms. Jamieson and Ms. Howard argue.
Rather than spending time in first-year composition trying to teach students how to find sources—or using computer programs to chase down plagiarism—faculty members in such courses should scrap the research paper altogether, the researchers said.
After all, students exhibit the same kinds of mistakes at the end of their first-year composition courses as they do at the beginning, regardless of the type of institution or whether the course is taught by a full-time faculty member or an adjunct, Ms. Jamieson said.
Part of the problem, she added, is the expectation that faculty members trained in composition have expertise in the subject being researched, whether it is abortion, the death penalty, or gun control: “Unless it’s in your field, you don’t know what a good source is and what isn’t.”
Instead, she said, students should work on shorter papers that are based on source materials assigned through class, with more guidance from the instructor throughout the process.
And, though she said she is startled to hear herself say it, Ms. Howard recommends changing the paradigm governing the teaching of the course. Typically, students are taught to begin a rough draft fairly early in the writing process, she said. But the evidence suggests that students should start writing later, after they are trained to read, analyze, and synthesize their sources, so that they can identify the argument and sort through the evidence.
“Our hypothesis is that teaching analysis can be a way of cracking open a whole set of disappointing issues we see in these papers,” Ms. Howard said. “On the most basic level, it’s reading comprehension: finding claims and finding evidence. Then you get to the much more interesting issues of analysis, which is how the writer is persuading the readers of claims.”
Ms. Jamieson and Ms. Howard suspect that education at the primary and secondary levels has not helped. Although many high schools now expect students to produce research papers, students’ performance on this task in college suggests their training is shallow. Standardized testing has taught students to identify the main idea in a piece of text, the researchers said, but not whether the underlying idea is sound.
Habitually grazing texts online may also play a role, Ms. Howard said. “It is true that the new literacies are changing the way we read, and many of us, including me, do a lot more skimming than we used to do. The trouble is, they are not also learning how to read deeply.”
Correction (3/22, 4:56 p.m.): This article originally omitted two types of resources that 70 percent of students in the study chose to cite. They cited books or journals, in addition to government documents or news sources, not just the latter. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.