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.