When I was an undergraduate, in the late 1990s, I wrote A LOT of papers. I was a literature and women’s studies double major, and I currently work with students who are almost all majoring in various fields in the humanities, so all of the opinions I’m about share are very deeply entrenched in a humanities perspective. As a undergraduate, I wrote a lot about texts and ideas. But I didn’t write a “research paper” until my senior year, when I spent the year writing my senior thesis and took a graduate-level class in literature. The papers that I wrote engaged with the texts that I read in class, both the primary literary texts and secondary works of criticism, but I rarely went to the library to seek out additional sources, and certainly not until my senior year when I was taking advanced classes in my majors.
Now, twenty years later, I work in the library with undergraduate students in the humanities from their first year through graduation. I see students in their first semester in college being asked to find sources on their topic, synthesize them, and come up with their own unique perspective. And every time I see students struggle to do this work, I wonder why we are asking them to do this before they’re ready.
When students come to college and choose a major, they are just beginning to enter a new world of knowledge. For faculty, we have been immersed in our disciplines for so long it can be easy to forget that we did not always know the most basic concepts, terms, and theories in our field. Even as a librarian, I have to remind myself that students don’t have an inherent understanding of the structures of information and the processes of research that, for me, are now part of the day-to-day world I walk in. The purpose of undergraduate study is to become familiar with the concepts, terms, and theories that make up the discipline of knowledge a student has chosen to study. And it is deeply unfair to drop them into the ocean of this knowledge without the tools and guideposts they need to navigate to their destination.
When instructors ask students to come into the library to find the sources they should read in order to be ready to write a paper in their class, we are dropping them into that ocean, and from what I’ve seen, they usually don’t have the tools to navigate. Nor should we expect that they do. It is the instructor’s job to introduce students to the key texts, the critical ideas, the specialized vocabulary, and the important scholars working in the discipline. It should not be the student’s job to seek out those texts because they don’t yet know what they should be looking for.
As a librarian, what I am often teaching to students is not information literacy so much as research literacy. I’m trying to help students understand how knowledge is created in their disciplines, and to understand their own place in that discipline. I want students to graduate feeling confident not only that they know the content and ideas presented in the courses they took but that they understand how that content and those ideas came to be and see that they, too, have the ability and right to contribute their own ideas to the discipline. Because that is what research is.
We distort the definition of research when we ask students to seek out six to ten sources in order to support their thesis statement. We distort the definition of research when we ask students to read a few articles and write about what they read. And yet, this is usually what instructors are asking students to do when they assign a “research paper,” even if it’s not what the instructor thinks she’s asking students to do.
Let’s stop assigning “research papers” to students who aren’t well-versed enough in their discipline to do research. Let’s instead introduce them to the important concepts they need in order to talk intelligently about the discipline and help them to see how those concepts and ideas have been discovered and communicated, how scholars in the field create the discipline itself. Let them engage with texts they read in class through writing, which remains one of the best ways for students to grapple with new ideas and incorporate them into their thinking, and through conversations with their peers in class. Let’s stop asking students to find those key texts and important works for themselves, before they even know what the ideas they are supposed to be finding are.
Save the library research paper for students in their last year in the major, students who have spent a few years learning what they need to know in order to form a meaningful research question, to find and understand the sources they need to inform their question, and to present their own ideas intelligently and within the context of all they’ve learned in their majors.