Research Assignments Without Thesis Statements: Unleash the Power of Questions

This is first of all a list of a links that I want to share as part of a presentation today. Commentary will be added later.

Abstract
In research assignments, students often get stuck on the idea of supporting a preconceived thesis, or worse, fall into mechanically reporting bits of information they have collected on a topic. They struggle with launching a genuine inquiry. This session will explore  the Question Formulation Technique as a way to teach questioning, not only as a start for research but also as a driver for continued learning.

My slides

Video capture (unedited, formal presentation begins at about 4:50)

Experiencing the QFT

How Can Medical Students Learn to Ask Better Questions?

DRAFT: Question Formulation Activity for online Information Literacy Tutorial

Question-Discover-Use: The Research Process

Learning Goals for Information Literacy

Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (ACRL)

Information Literacy and Recent Graduates: New from PIL | Library Babel Fish | Inside Higher Ed

From Barbara Fister's Library Babel Fish about the new report from Project Information Literacy
 

This bears further reading and discussion. I'm firing this off right away because the note that students don't feel prepared "to formulate and ask questions of their own" strikes a chord with a major theme/concept that we have been wrestling with in our information literacy program here at SUNY Oswego. This indicates one of the reasons that our response to the ACRL Framework features Question as one of three basic concepts in the Research Process. That is, students struggle to learn how to raise their own questions. The other reasons are that we as librarians and writing teachers still don't know how to teach independent questioning, at least not well; and that questions and answers somehow drive what we as humans experience as informative.

Information Literacy Learning Goals at SUNY Oswego: Question, Discover Sources, Use Sources

Video overview of our framework: The Research Process

The Library Isn't Flat | Library Babel Fish @insidehighered

Once again, Barbara Fister says it well.

http://shar.es/PkNlJ

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Video series aims to help instructors help first-generation students @insidehighered

This has situated cognition and cognitive apprenticeship all over it. 

• Good ideas for improving learning and success for at-risk and other students
• Nice strategy for spreading knowledge through an online collection of short videos
• With the bonus that such a strategy could be used for students and not just faculty

http://shar.es/VPSGw

When a U.S. Senate committee sought to highlight successful practices in educating minority and other underserved students at a hearing last month, it turned to officials at an urban two-year institution (Long Beach City College); a historically black university (Fayetteville State University); and Heritage University, a private institution that is located on tribal land in Washington State and where about three-quarters of students are the first in their families to attend college.   Congress i...

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Don't evaluate scholarly research on public impact alone (essay) @insidehighered

This op-ed on how to evaluate and explain the impact of research on the public good relies on a communities of practice model for expertise and makes some clear explanations about how students become members and practitioners of a discipline.  The ideas here align closely with the new ACRL Framework for information literacy and our Question-Discover-Use conceptual framework.

http://shar.es/SLHkG

Recently, the value of academic research, especially in the humanities and social sciences, has been questioned. The current majority party in the House of Representatives has proposed cutting science funding for social science research,  and eliminating all funding,  for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof accused faculty,  of engaging in specialized research disconnected from the interests of the reading p...

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As Researchers Turn to Google, Libraries Navigate the Messy World of Discovery Tools

http://shar.es/TFPgN

"Librarians want to make their content searchable, but they're wary of commercial software that may skew the results."

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We are introducing Ebsco Discovery this summer.  I am struggling with the impact  that a discovery layer might have on the research behavior of our students and faculty, and how we might use it to promote information literacy.

One of our goals is to help students explore and understand the information landscapes for their disciplines.  Can EDS help us highlight the features of conversations in the various disciplines?  Or will it make it even easier to think that Ebscohost is a database, that Gale Virtual Reference Library is an encyclopedia and that knowledge is just a pile of identical grains of truth?

One of my colleagues has noted that EDS is meant to be intuitive for a novice researcher.  Our expert researchers currently prefer to go straight to their favorite databases.   Can EDS help us nudge the novices toward the behaviors of the experts?

Well those are my first thoughts and worries.

Digital Literacy in General Education, 2013

As reported in my earlier post, the General Education Council at Oswego has been reviewing and approving, or not, computer and information literacy infusion plans for our major programs. 

The infusion of the "basic operations of personal computer use" learning outcome was nearly taken for granted because of the widespread use of word processing, online searching, spreadsheets and computer-based presentations.  The only issue was whether our faculty are prepared to assist students and provide constructive feedback in the use of tools that are not always well used by faculty.

In trying to make sense of the other SUNY General Education learning outcomes (1999) for Computer and Information Management, the Council resolved that the main reason to set the outcomes about research practices apart from related outcomes in Writing and Critical Thinking in 2013 is to emphasize the use of computers in those practices, especially in regard to managing and analyzing data.  In one extreme case, the Council used the terminology "numerical data, be it quantitative or qualitative."  In the sciences and social sciences, this presented no problems, and in fact the elegance of some of the science plans probably inspired this position.

However, this insistence on the use of computer tools for analysis of data has made it almost impossible for programs in the humanities to officially infuse computer literacy in their courses, even though they have information literacy practice integrated into almost all of their courses and use computers widely for searching, reading and writing (and viewing and presenting).  The offering of a digital humanities version of our Computer Science 101 course has made it sensible and attractive for the history and criticism programs to simply require that course instead of getting approval for an infusion plan.  That is because the primary source material for history and criticism can be easily and meaningfully digitized even when the scholars are mainly benefitting from the digital projects rather than engaged in the digitizing as a part of their own professional practice.

The one discipline that is left hanging is Philosophy.  It is not that important connections and collaborations between philosophy and computing don't exist--logic, artificial intelligence and cognitive science can be all about philosophy and computing.  It's that the work of philosophy is theory and does not at its core work with the kind of data that scientists use, or even with the kind of accurate and authentic representation of texts and objects that are important in history and criticism.  Philosophy's counterpart to data appears to be arguments that are to be analyzed on their own.  Any computer assistance to that analysis is very simple and merely a help.  Computer use is ancillary and remains far from the authentic practices of philosophers.  It remains to be seen how Philosophy and the General Education Council will deal with the Computer and Information Literacy requirement.

General Education, Digital Literacy and Information Literacy: Infusion at SUNY Oswego

Entering the 21st Century:  SUNY GER, ACRL Standards, Middle States and 3 Directions

We have redesigned our General Education program at Oswego to infuse information literacy into our curriculum.  I served on the General Education Council throughout this process and encountered two happy surprises: the 3 Directions conceptualization of information literacy is a settled issue among our faculty and taken for granted; and the only way to concieve of basic computer use at this time is in terms of digital literacy, with disruptive outcomes in the disciplines.  Background on information literacy in our General Education follows an explanation of my surprises.

First Surprise: Information Literacy as a settled issue

At the beginning of deliberations on infusion I shared with the Council my earlier post on "Integrated Literacy Across the Curriculum," and a continuing re-statement of my position that information literacy broadly-concieved encompasses reading and writing and thinking as well searching for sources, and necessarily incorporates the SUNY GER categories for Writing and Critical Thinking as well as Computer and Information Literacy. This is an ax I have been grinding here for over a decade with no clear success, at least until I saw this sentence in the Council minutes:

To begin, there is no little degree of overlap between the third learning outcome in Computer and Information Literacy, the third learning outcome in Writing, and the learning outcomes for Critical Thinking

This is not the revolution, but my feeling that my position is not only accepted by the Council but also more broadly by the faculty was reinforced when we began to review the infusion plans from the departments.  Most of the plans documented how students met the information literacy outcomes in the context of learning to do research and write in their disciplines.  In fact most departments found this easy to document, leaving the computer literacy outcome as the primary point of failure.

I am beginning to feel that the conceptualization of information literacy as the broad ability to use information for learning, life and work is almost taken for granted at SUNY Oswego.  That is better than a revolution--it means that information literacy is becoming an institution.

Second Surprise: Re-inventing "basic operations of personal computer use" as digital literacy in the disciplines

We quickly encountered problems in how well our faculty could address computer use in their programs. It certainly seems quaint to me to be concerned about "personal computer use" as a college level learning outcome in 2013.

• Capacity of faculty to teach and assess digital presentation 
• Variation in use of computers in the disciplines especially in regard to data in the humanities

Background

I arrived in Oswego in August 2000, just in time to greet the 21st Century on January 1, 2001.  Oswego State had just started a revised general education program based on the 1999 SUNY GER (General Education Requirements) which included an information literacy requirement under the guise of Computer and Information Management.

"Students will:

• perform the basic operations of personal computer use;
• understand and use basic research techniques; and
• locate, evaluate, and synthesize information from a variety of sources."

Although the central administration of SUNY allowed either infusion or a required course to meet the requirement, the expedient move at Oswego was to go with a required Computer Science course, and as it happened the faculty in Computer Science focussed on basic computer use.  It took a few years for them to extend the course into a research activity: requiring source material to be used and cited in creating a web page/site.  Meanwhile, in 2004 the faculty at Oswego divided the Computer and Information Management requirement into Computer Literacy and Information Literacy with an advanced component for Information Literacy and encouragement for departments to infuse these into their majors.  Several departments in the sciences chose to infuse at the time.

Then three years ago SUNY began to be more flexible about the implementation of SUNY GER and at Oswego we took advantage of that to improve our program, in part by simplifying and streamlining the program through reducing the required courses by a third.  As a result Oswego's General Education program now requires that Computer and Information Literacy be met by infusion.  Departments then had to either document how the learning outcomes would be achieved in the required courses for each major, or revise their programs to require a course, usually in Computer Science, that is determined to include the learning outcomes for Computer and Information Literacy.

This past year, then, the General Education Council reviewed proposed infusion plans from almost all our departments, negotiated with departments that were not quite on the mark, approved most of the plans, and coordinated with the Academic Policies Council to approve a handful of program revisions.

The Future of Information Literacy in Higher Education

This prospectus from the ACRL task force charged with revising the ACRL Information Literacy Standards (2000) highlights the likely introduction of 'threshold concepts' and 'metaliteracy' as features of the new statement of standards.  They frame these two elements with the idea of a holistic view of educated information use and the idea of lifelong learning as opposed to a skill set that can be taught and "learned once and for all."  In a coming post I will speak in more detail as to what we are doing at SUNY Oswego in regard to threshold concepts and metaliteracy, and also how our work on a Cognitive Apprenticeship approach strengthens learning through continuous practice.  I want to emphasize the holistic aspect but for now will only point out that other things on this blog already address that thoroughly.

 

Also For Now

About threshold concepts: "They are the central concepts that we want our students to understand and put into practice, that encourage them to think and act like practitioners themselves." (Hofer, Townsend, and Brunetti, 2012, 387-88 quoted by the ACRL task force.)

At Oswego we have been coming at this from the perspective of situated cognition which calls for explication of the landmark or guidepost concepts and then implicit or tacit learning of details and refinements of practice.  Related work on Cognitive Apprenticeship calls for "focus on conceptualizing the whole task before executing the parts." (Collins, Brown and Holum, 1991.)  The outcome of our work is the Question-Discover-Use conceptual framework of the research process.  In short, this framework shows students how posing a question, finding expert sources and using those sources to build new knowledge will involve them in growing participation in a community (discipline) of scholarly or professional practice.

 

And about metaliteracy:  "Metaliteracy expands the scope of traditional information skills…to include the collaborative production and sharing of information in participatory digital environments… " (Mackey and Jacobson, forthcoming quoted by the ACRL task force.)

 

We have also anticipated this development in creating Question-Discover-Use.  We have tried to pair words for traditional literacy with terms that are more open to a wide range of media and formats.  So Reading/Understanding, Writing/Sharing, and Thinking/Creating.  We also work to emphasize the social and personal elements of research by suggesting that one's question should interest others; that sources are persons with names and expertise, not just a book object; that one's own work is a disciplined contribution to knowledge; that integrity is a matter of respect for others and oneself; and that a student researcher is joining a network of professionals.

And For Later

In a future post I will report on how we developed Question-Discover-Use in part as an attempt to update our past uses of the ACRL Standards and how we are using the framework in improving information literacy learning through the principles of Cognitive Apprenticeship. 

Also, we hope to offer an early exemplar of what the new Standards could look like in practice.

Review of Michael Billig, 'Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences' | Inside Higher Ed

Communities of linguistic practice exposed.

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2013/10/09/review-michael-billig-learn-write-badly-how-succeed-social-sciences#.UlVlBFPYyxA.gmail

Fwd: Essay on crowdsourcing the humanities curriculum | Inside Higher Ed

We are in the midst of considering what we might create in terms of a credit course for developing information literacy practices.  I wonder how we could let the students crowdsource the course for themselves.
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2013/05/20/essay-crowdsourcing-humanities-curriculum#.UZpzeEHoWB8.email

Open and Shut: A Case for Preparing Our Students for What’s Next | Inside Higher Ed

In this post Barbara Fister makes a wonderfully succinct statement about the role of librarians in undergraduate education.  Also she echoes heartily my Participation Direction, and Lloyd's Information Literacy Landscapes:
Open and Shut: A Case for Preparing Our Students for What’s Next | Inside Higher Ed

My job as a librarian at a liberal arts college is to help students join those conversations by providing doorways into the places where the discussions are happening and by helping students figure out how to pick up what’s going on and practice unfamiliar conversational norms. Much of this work is done by disciplinary faculty, but sometimes they forget how hard it is to find the door and work the doorknob, which is an odd shape and design, baffling until you're used to it. Librarians can also sometimes help students figure out what some of the puzzling words in the conversation are and why that person in the corner is waving her hands so excitedly and why someone else is rolling his eyes. We, like the students, are not insiders, but we’ve picked up some strategies for entering conversations that have been going on for years around us.  We’re there to encourage them as they step forward, looking over their shoulders nervously. Am I doing this right? Will I be okay?

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/open-and-shut-case-preparing-our-students-what%E2%80%99s-next#ixzz1uZN6m3KC
Inside Higher Ed

An Information Landscape Problem: "Teaching Web-Scale Discovery in the Context of Google"

Convenience and its Discontents: Teaching Web-Scale Discovery in the Context of Google

This post by Pete Coco on ACRLog basically raises the question of what do we teach when we don't need to teach the clicks. And his answer aligns with mine: Teach "the concepts and conventions underneath all the clicking."

Part of our struggle as librarians is to fully understand and fully show our students that research is not what happens on a two-dimensional screen with a search box in the middle. Research happens in us as we learn and then share what we know. It's not a matter of objects that fit an assignment. It's a matter of finding our ways into the information landscapes where our fellow learners (sources) share what they know and carry on with their own learning in their own communities of practice.

Granted, the multi-dimensional and dynamic world of human knowledge, even in a single discipline, is a huge thing for our students to comprehend. They can't do it all at once. But as library educators we have to keep pointing them to what's next. One citation can always lead to another. One question always leads to the next question. And you will get lost if you don't start thinking about the landscape you are exploring, and the context that gives you the sources you are discovering.

Sources of Confusion | Inside Higher Ed

From Fister's Library Babel Fish, comments on composition research that illuminates the problems students have with using sources through quotation and paraphrase.

I am beginning to see that we should teach summarizing of sources and discourage the use of paraphrase. It's the difference between collecting bits of information and slapping them together and learning from sources so that one can make a coherent and integrated statement of what one learns from the sources.

Citations Are More Than Un-Plagiarism

I can't believe I haven't noticed this before. Iris Jastrom echoes and reinforces the idea of citation as a shared scholarly practice, adapted to the particular community of practice one hopes to enter.
http://pegasuslibrarian.com/2008/01/class-citation-as-lens-for.html/trackback
See also my post here from last year and from "Books are for Use" the year before. And before that the Good Learning Versus Plagiarism Tutorial.

Open Access Copy Available

An open access copy of the "3 Directions" article is now available on the College and Research Libraries website.

Integrated Literacy Across the Curriculum

At SUNY Oswego we have three areas in which we require students to develop skills and abilities to an advanced level on the basis of infusion or work across-the-curriculum. These areas include:

• 1. Communication, written and oral
• 2. Critical Thinking
• 3. Information Literacy

We have approached these areas as if they are three to five separate things, leading to overly complex requirements and multiple overlapping programs. On the other hand, a complete description of information literacy offers an integrated view of these skills. And this integrated view can help us design programs that are less burdensome and more powerful.

Below I quote the national Information Literacy Competency Standards and provide notes on how each standard applies to Communications, Critical Thinking and Information Literacy.

The Information Literacy Standards Embrace Communication and Critical Thinking

Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education (ACRL 2000.)

1. The information literate student determines the nature and extent of the information needed.

2. The information literate student accesses needed information effectively and efficiently.

3. The information literate student evaluates information and its sources critically and incorporates selected information into his or her knowledge base and value system.

4. The information literate student, individually or as a member of a group, uses information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose.

5. The information literate student understands many of the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information and accesses and uses information ethically and legally.

1. Information need

Other words for this include “research question” and “thesis.” This is the first step for both an information search and also for planning and composing an essay. Critical thinking often gives rise to the information need.

2. Access information

This is the one element, searching for and accessing informative sources, that is predominately the concern of library and information science. At the same time, these abilities are meaningless exercises when separated from the kind of discovery and inquiry associated with writing and critical thinking. Any authenticate search for information is embedded in learning, and becomes most powerful when done thoughtfully.

3. Evaluation, critical thinking and learning

Critical thinking predominates here. From the information search perspective, we consider formal means for selecting one source over another. Critical reading of the selected sources provides a deeper evaluation of the information, and develops the material for good writing.

4. Uses information for a purpose

In a college program, written and oral presentation of one’s learning is the ultimate purpose. Obviously communication predominates here, but any presentation is likely to take the form of an argument and to include information from other sources as evidence.

5. Ethical, legal, economic, and social issues

It is easy to read this as about not doing plagiarism. But when we think about our integrity as scholars, we may want to think that we have done a good job in our research, our argument and our writing. In other words, that we treat our field, our sources, our own thinking, and our readers fairly and with respect.

Which is All to Propose

When we grant that these three areas are generally integral and necessary to each other, then we can entertain the development of an integrated statement of learning outcomes, coherent programs for developing and practicing these abilities and an integrated assessment at the capstone level, subject to the practices and situations in the specific disciplines.

The article for my colleagues at SUNY Oswego, or not

The 3 Directions article with Oswego's proxy
or you can follow this citation to your library's holdings

Nichols, J. T. (2009). The 3 Directions: Situated Information Literacy. College and Research Libraries, 70(6), 515-530.

Making It Personal: Teaching Intellectual Integrity

The title is from a presentation I gave on Friday, June 18, to the SUNY Librarians Association Conference.Below are brief summaries for my main points and links for additional resources. Feel free to leave comments, and especially any questions you would like to be answered.

The framework for this treatment of intellectual integrity is the 3 Directions Model. And this presentation is a case study of how a basic skill can gain meaning for the student when it is placed into the context of learning and participation in scholarship.

Our Challenge as Information Literacy Educators

Is our job is to teach correct citations? Or is it to teach that:

•Intellectual integrity is participation as a person with other persons to advance knowledge in communities of practice?
•Sources are ultimately persons who represent their knowledge in books and articles—and learners are ultimately persons?

My own answer, stated more fully in the "3 Directions" article, is to elevate the learning beyond the mechanics of citation and to guide students into disciplinary communities of practice. Each community will have its own rules and conventions, but each academic discipline shares something of the core practices of scholarship.

My use of "persons" reflects an emerging sense on my part that in a world of social networking everything becomes more personal and less institutional even as elements of our institutions variously crumble, linger, or re-emerge with more vigor and power. I will have to explain this more in a later post, when I've figured it out.

Pedagogical Challenge: What is the biggest cognitive hurdle that students’ face? What attitude or belief keeps them from engaging with the learning goals? This is a critical step in the planning phase of instructional design.

For our students at Oswego, we have identified this as the pedagogical challenge:

•Research is collecting and reporting facts, and citations are only needed for quotes from books and articles.

We have tried to address this challenge with concept number 1 below.

Guidepost Concepts

In order to rise above the explication of skills and detailed rules we need to identify the concept tools that students will find useful for years, the kinds of things that are pervasive and are likely to persist for years. These can serve as guideposts or landmarks regardless of whatever notions the APA and MLA editors get in their heads.

1.At the heart of research is the building of new knowledge on the basis of older knowledge. Citations to sources identify you as a scholar, highlight the elements that are your original work, and place your work into the context of a discipline.

2.Cite others work whether you quote, paraphrase, summarize or borrow ideas from the work, and regardless of the media or format of the work.

3.A citation will usually include author, title, and publication information. The layout and format of the citation will vary by discipline and by the media or format of the cited work.

Show and Do

Instead of explicating things that are better absorbed through practice than through listening we try to show (make the practice clear and transparent) and ask the students to do (put the concepts into action and application).

• In our Lake Effect Research Challenge (LERC) we point out Author/Title/Publication information at every turn, whenever a results list or bibliography appears.
• Each of the “Finding” sections for books, articles and websites in turn feed into how to cite and provide an opportunity to review why and how to cite. Each how-to page merely lists the elements important to the specific format and provides an example of a citation in APA and MLA style. The author/title/publication landmarks are highlighted in each example.
• The Challenge worksheet requires a citation for a book, an article, and a website.

Our first year students have a number of chances to use the tutorial and almost all first year students must complete at least one research assignment with citations.

Thread into the Curriculum

To make integrity a pervasive part of college culture we have to move out beyond library instruction to first year students. Library and classroom faculty both need to:

• Point out the presence or lack of a bibliography for every source.
• Note bibliography as a primary formal marker for scholarship.
• Review citation style for the discipline.
• Talk about intellectual integrity, connecting citation to good scholarly practice.

To help with this at Oswego we have devoted an entire row of our Information Literacy Outcomes matrix to integrity and other values related to use of library and information resources. This matrix is being used as a guide to assessing learning and designing instruction.

In league with an online teacher and an instructional designer I created the "Good Learning Versus Plagiarism" tutorial, which has been used in a number of courses in a variety of ways to emphasize intellectual integrity. The Good Learning tutorial with an accompanying quiz is offered to every online course at Oswego for the instructor to use in any way that suits them. The 'founding' online teacher requires that every student pass the quiz with a perfect score (multiple submissions are allowed) before progressing beyond the first few weeks of the course.

This past year the Oswego Committee for Intellectual Integrity expanded on the Good Learning tutorial and rebuilt the quiz bank. The tutorial is now part of the "Intellectual Integrity Site" along with materials from the Colby, Bates, and Bowdoin Plagiarism Resource Site. The effectiveness of the latter materials was validated in research by Dee and Jacob (Dee, T. S., & Jacob, B. A. (2010). Rational ignorance in education: A field experiment in student plagiarism (No. 15672). NBER Working Paper Series. National Bureau of Economic Research. Retrieved from http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/academics/economics/Dee/w15672.pdf)

Online Objects

Lake Effect Research Challenge
Information Literacy Learning Outcomes (the matrix).
Good Learning Versus Plagiarism
Intellectual Integrity Site, SUNY Oswego

A Showcase for Scholarly Communication

[The Oswego students and their posters]

This past Tuesday I attended "SUNY Undergraduates Shaping New York's Future: A Showcase of Scholarly Posters at the Capitol". The program for the conference demonstrates the great variety of work presented but does not capture the sense of engagement with learning that filled the halls.

We had 178 students with over a hundred posters from 34 of the 65 SUNY institutions. The colleges included every sector of SUNY: community colleges, comprehensive colleges and the university centers.

In that mix, every student I talked to was eager to tell me about their project and articulate in answering my probing questions about their sources and methodology. Students also remarked on the fact that professors from other colleges were coming around and discussing the various work as fellow researchers and not just teachers and graders. And students with similar research interests were connecting and talking about their research.

Since this was the State Capitol after all (and there is a reason we picked that venue), state senators and assembly members came through and talked with the students, showing interest in the posters. Yes, showing great stuff to our funders was part of what this was about, but the primary purpose from the start was to impress on our students that their schoolwork is not an end in itself, and that presenting and publishing what they learn completes and continues a very important cycle.