Month: May 2008

Last Friday the library was unusually empty and quiet, and yet somehow I stayed busy answering more questions than I’d answered per hour in days… don’t know quite how that happened, exactly. But amidst this flurry of activity, I worked with a student who was stuck. She’d handed in a draft and been told she need more “opposing evidence” in her paper.

Undergraduates often wish our search tools were good at two things that are impossible: search for articles that explore a topic through a given theoretical framework, and find things that disagree with a given viewpoint. And yet, these tasks are fundamental to the work of negotiating their own position in the scholarly conversation on a topic.

Well, this student and I had a very interesting half-hour together. Even now, I don’t have a clue what she was writing about. It was all sciency and stuff and I am decidedly not of a scientific bent. So it was interesting to both of us to watch how we negotiated our discussion and navigation through sources and result lists. But what really interested me was our discussion about how to find opposing evidence.

We tried direct searching for the topic in general, to get a sense of how much conversation there is and to see if a few opposing views would jump out at us. They didn’t. So I asked if she had any good articles already and whether these had literature reviews, and this is where we really made progress. After I explained what a literature review was and the purpose it serves in a paper (painting a picture of the topic and positioning the author at some point within that picture), she acknowledged that there had been literature review sections, but that her authors had never said they disagreed with anyone.

“But did they say something like, ‘He says x and she says y but I say z‘ anywhere?” I asked.

Yes, they had.

And that’s when I realized that she didn’t understand the scholarly code for “I disagree.” As I explained that scholars often know each other, and that even if they don’t, they have to build reputations and position themselves positively within their fields, and that they therefore cast disagreement in terms of creating alternate positions based on similar evidence, the girl’s eyes got big and her mouth fell open. When I finished with, “So you see, ‘He says x and she says y but I say z‘ is code for ‘I disagree with those other people,'” the student couldn’t contain herself any longer. “This is HUGE!!” She gasped.

And suddenly a whole world of opposing evidence opened up for her, right in the literature reviews of the articles she’d already found. She was ecstatic.

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Pretty soon I’ll be dashing off to teach a class of third-term freshmen. They’ll be creating a class magazine as their final project, and I’m joining them to help think about what kind of research is available, how to evaluate it, and how to use it effectively. I kind of thought that last bit was going to be the kicker since they’d be stepping out of the “regular term paper” format and writing for a magazine. So I thought I’d bring in a variety of magazines to show that while some don’t do things like citations or bibliographies, others do. Physics Today has articles that look like research papers. The Economist doesn’t. Both publications match their evidence to their audience and argument, but I wanted them to see examples of some publications doing just what these students will be doing.

Sounded like a nifty class and I was all excited about it. Then I read the questions the professor had asked each student to write for me on their Moodle forum. … Then I completely reorganized the entire class.

These students are completely befuddled by the task of evaluating the sources they find, they know their topics are too broad or too boring (and they know they don’t know how to fix that), and they don’t have any idea where to find the articles they’ve been told the library has available for them to find and read. And this even after completing a brief annotated bibliography on their topics. So I’m still bringing in a couple of examples, but that’s been relegated to a bit part tucked near the end of the class. Now I’ve got three main questions we’ll try to answer together.

• Where the heck can I find stuff?!?
  This’ll be a quick overview of the kinds of things available, and an intro to one thing (probably ProQuest… but I’m still deciding based on the student’s questions). We’ll build concept clusters and work off of student questions. (It’ll take maybe half the time.)
• But how do I know if it’s good?
  I’ll touch on using Ulrich’s to test the “articles” they find online, but the main thrust will be sussing out credibility and relevance. The most relevant article may not have any way of testing credibility, and the most credible article may not actually help you construct a good argument. I also want to make the point that if you think of what you’re reading as “evidence” rather than as “what important people said” you can more easily figure out what serves your argument.
• Now, how do I used it well?
  Well now, this is what interests me, but I probably won’t have much time left… maybe 5 minutes out of the hour? The students say they’re unsure how to read articles and then come up with something that’s “uniquely my own” and I think this is where I can address that concern. If you’re using evidence in service of an argument, you’re less likely to simply mimic other people than if you use “things important people have said.” And if you use evidence in service of an argument, and keep your audience in mind, then you’ll be better able to figure out what evidence would convince them that your argument is sound. Do you need statistics? Do you need scholarly discussion? Do you need interviews? It’s hard to come up with answers to these in a vacuum. You need an audience and an argument.

I’ll be pondering how to make this last point gel a little bit over the next 45 minutes. I think there’s something there, but I don’t think I’ve come up with the right way to convey it so that it’s useful to these freshman rather than just interesting to me.

Also? Having students send in questions is GREAT. I need to ask for this more often.

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