Silva, Mary Lourdes. “Can I Google That? Research Strategies of Undergraduate Students.” The New Digital Scholar: Exploring and Enriching the Research and Writing Practices of NEXTGEN STUDENTS. Ed.
Randall McClure and James P. Purdy. Medford, NJ: 2013. 

Undergraduate students lack the necessary information literacy (IL) skills, as they struggle with requisite academic research skills from finding appropriate and reliable source information to citing and referencing said sources. Current IL instruction is largely didactic, prescriptive, and ultimately ineffective. IL shapes and is shaped by
writing, as both are “social, cognitive, rhetorical, technological, and situated processes of using language, tools, systems, artifacts, and people to construct knowledge and participate in communities of practice” (162). The
challenge for teachers lies in the fact that the processes associated with writing and IL are mediated by technologies and no two are the same; the prescriptive IL curriculum doesn’t account for the array of available idiosyncratic databases or individual students’ needs.

In an effort to conduct a research study that acknowledges the “interconnected complexities and challenges of sociotechnical landscapes and navigation,” Silva uses a multiliteracies model (including five literacies) to frame her study, which will examine the effects of an intervention grounded in research from IL, writing studies, cognitive
psychology, computer science, and information science technology to render a fuller account of how students manage their learning “across various information and technological landscapes” while completing a research paper assignment during an academic quarter (163). Silva’s use of research from five disciplines/fields to account for the five distinct, but interrelated literacies reinforces the need for multidisciplinary research in rhetoric and composition. Silva’s results report on students’ navigational and IL development, aiming to identify the navigational and IL strategies and skills students use at the beginning of the course and at the end of it, after they have received training grounded in a multiliteracies approach.

Overview of Study

Subjects include three students (two juniors and a freshman) in a research writing class at a large four-year university; all subjects reported being comfortable using the internet and their own personal computers. Strategy instruction was provided via a digital folder which provided students with in seven video tutorials (4-6 minutes in length) and two handouts that essentially repeated, but categorized, the information from the videos. Students’ online navigational behaviors were recorded using Camtasia. The intervention came during the second week of the quarter (frequency and duration of class meetings not provided) and participants also received individualized training in person for thirty minutes over 4-5 consecutive days. Additional in-person training was also provided during the fifth week of the quarter, which included an hour-long review session. Before each training session, students had to view the video tutorials provided. The purpose of the individual meetings, then, was to review strategies and provide Silva with an opportunity to witness students’ application of these strategies. During the independent phase of the study (week six of the quarter), students had to complete three 25-30 minute screen-capture recordings of their online research to find four of the five required sources for the final research paper.

Results and Discussion

Navigational Literacy (Week 1 –before training)

While each student was reportedly unique in how they managed navigating multiple information landscapes, Silva reports that each utilized some variation of the hub and spoke method, in which users oscillate between the results page and a target page using the Back button. Ethan (subject pseudonym) also used a fan approach, opening multiple tabs for some search results so that he was able to skim and evaluate each, then close them if necessary. Neither Ana nor Isabel’s navigational practices caused much disorientation, likely because of their reliance on the Back button; however, Ana’s navigational practices involved more tools than Isabel’s, as she used the address bar to move among databases, filtered results to only show Academic Journals, and adding keyword or phrases into her search to narrow results.

(Week 6—after training)

In attempting to fulfill their information need, students preferred strategy was to mine a reference from their
first iteration of the research paper, looking for articles citing this source. The results show that this method increased participants’ average number of navigational strategies per session. Participants’ misreading of citations lead
to an increase in their number of navigational strategies per session, as well; this makes me wonder how we might embed citation instruction in research instruction and how I might go about modeling usable citation navigation while
teaching students the construction of a citation. Further, I also wonder if there are many studies that have researched the effect of citation programs like Evernote, EasyBib, and CitationBuilder, on students’ navigational literacies in library databases.

Distinctions I noticed: Silva mentions that students felt more control over the research process in using
reference mining; I wonder how much of that control comes from the provision of the strategy, the naming of it, and introducing it as a way to make students’ processes easier. More to the point, how much of that control is perceived? Further, providing students with a sanctioned, named process is bound to make them feel more in control than they felt prior to producing a five page paper which has been graded and given feedback. Are Silva’s results significant?

Information Literacy

(Week 1—before training)

Students didn’t have a well-defined and rigorous set of criteria for evaluating source material, sometimes failing to recognize the URLs of blogs, which is consistent with prior research. Her findings point to two problems: students who use search engines need more instructional support regarding the sociotechnical and discursive architecture of the web. Second, library websites don’t always help students evaluate sources’ currency, accuracy, or reliability (171).

(Week 6—after training)

None of the participants evaluated sources for currency or reliability, likely because they used Google Scholar,
EBSCOhost, JSTOR, and the library catalog. This has some serious implications for library instruction and the ways that the library is framed for students as a palace of facts. Participants did evaluate criteria based on relevance, which began with mining instructor feedback on their first paper and addressing the instructor’s comments in their subsequent searches for source material.

Implications for pedagogies:

These findings have serious implications for the types of feedback instructors provide students in the
prewriting stages (if there is no shorter assignment preceding the research paper), and makes a relatively strong argument for requiring a shorter, lower-stakes assignment that gauges students’ IL aptitude while engaging them in the research process. Perhaps this is the IL version of the traditional Literacy Narrative?

Implications of the study

• Help students generate relevant, situated keywords that do not necessarily rely on students’ prior knowledge. My suggestion: Turn this into a collaborative activity that involves the entire class; generate terms for everyone, have students road test them, then report back to the class about the process and results.
  
• Help students understand the limitations of databases and search engines.My suggestion: Turn this into a small group activity. Groups can be comprised of students with similar majors—a nod to WID—and they can research keywords from their discipline in various engines and databases and report back.
  
• Help students create rigorous and well-defined source evaluation criteria. My suggestion: Provide a rubric and have students amend it as they experience research—perhaps in a wiki? They could also develop discipline-specific rubrics in groups (couple this with previous activity).
  
• Teach students how to mine references. My suggestion: Have them demonstrate the limitations of certain databases in doing so by mining as an in-class activity.

Helms-Park, Rena and Paul Stapleton. “How the views of faculty can inform undergraduate Web-based research: Implications for academic writing.” Computers and Composition 23 (2006): 444-461.

Like Silva, Helms-Park and Stapleton call for a rigorous evaluation system for Web sources for use by undergraduate students in researched writing assignments. Helms-Park and Stapleton argue that these criteria can be generated by and match the requirements of faculty within specific disciplines, utilizing a three-part survey of Humanities faculty as support. Echoing Silva’s concerns about the didactic and decontextualized nature of IL instruction that
students receive, the authors claim that students seem to use a set of ambiguous evaluation criteria that differs greatly from those used or preferred by faculty in specific disciplines. Further, academic writing has yet to account for and attend to “new multimedia definitions of literacy”, which has contributed to the lack of appropriate evaluative instruments (446).

The study examines “how faculty rate students’ Web citations” and how they perceive and value them as compared to paper-based, text sources in an effort to identify key evaluative criteria for the development of a multitrait checklist for use by instructors and students to assess the need for and appropriate use of Web sources in academic papers. 

The four Web site features that faculty deemed most important were academic rigor, reputation of the author or sponsoring organization, an identified author, and objectivity and reliability of site content (450). Faculty felt that paper-based library sources were more reliable and objective than those on the web and thus felt they were more acceptable than web sources in academic papers. Faculty appear to be using print/textual assessment criteria for Web sources, which supports the authors’ statement that academic writing has yet to develop definitions of multimedia literacy and its characteristics. Their comparatively lower ratings of features characteristic of digital and Web sources indicate a gap between the perspectives of students and instructors.

One of the more interesting findings was faculty’s belief that students use Web-based research as a “crutch”, as if students’ ability to gather a larger quantity of sources somehow undercuts the quality of the sources; further, it seems as if faculty would prefer to shift students’ attention to discrediting these sources instead of managing students’ expectations of them or adapting pedagogies to account for their prevalence.

The multitrait checklist devoted to Web-source assessment will aim to achieve validity of sources through criteria identified by faculty members in particular programs, disciplines, or departments; for the Humanities, the authors identify the following criteria:

• Academic rigor of the site (What is “academic” rigor? How is this being introduced or explained to students?
  
• Reputation of the author or sponsoring organization (This is also part of a conversation about bias and ethos; why isn’t it being framed that way?)
  
• Objectivity and reliability of the site’s contents (Why is objectivity desirable? In all contexts and purposes?)
  
• Transparency of a site (Doesn’t this assume the rigor and reputation? If not, why?)
  

Feasability and inter-rater reliability are established through multiple instructors visiting and evaluating every site used in a student paper (AIN’T NOBODY GOT TIME FOR THAT). However, if we do this in composition in service of our discipline and others, are we helping to ensure student success and promoting and developing students 21^st Century Literacy skills?

This prototype for a Web checklist was used in a first-year EAP course designed for multilingual learners. The instructor conducted hour-long interviews with students who used “substandard Web sources” in an effort to demonstrate the inferiority of the source in serving the student’s purpose in choosing the site. I think the inferiority of the site should also be framed in relation to the student’s purpose in writing, as well as their audience. I think there’s a significant opportunity here to demonstrate the rhetorical nature of the rubric and evaluation criteria for Web sources as students’ need and purpose in writing changes. Writing and its contexts are fluid, yet complex, and I feel that this study may have benefited from some of Silva's insights concerning the nature of IL and writing.