R. McClure & J.P. Purdy (Eds.). The new digital scholar: Exploring and enriching the the research and writing practices of nextgen students. Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc.

I feel like I have to summarize Jamieson & Howard’s chapter. They examined researched writing from 16 institutions and that the found majority of students copy either through quotation or not, paraphrase, or patchwrite when using sources, suggesting that students are engaging with sources only at the sentence level. Jamieson and Howard also discovered that many of these quotations, paraphrases & patchwrites come from just the first 4 pages of a source. Their findings bring into question how much students are fully reading and comprehending the sources that they use.

I have seen this in my own teaching. This lack of true reading or comprehension not only impacts their use of sources, but also the quality of arguments they produce. Many students go into research with a preconceived argument and simply look for evidence to support it. In seeing this trend I began to assign exploratory essays prior to students writing a research paper.  This type of essay is described by William Zeiger in his essay “The Exploratory Essay: Enfranchising the Spirit of Inquiry in College Composition.” This type of assignment asks students to focus on one source at a time evaluating it and reflecting on how it has impacted their thinking. They are asked to hold off on determining a thesis until after they have examined their sources. I liked their inquiry based nature of this type of writing and generally have found that these essays led to better topics, clearer vision, and better source use.

Silva’s chapter provided insight into the struggles students experience in trying to locate good sources. Again, this is something I have witnessed first-hand in my own classes. Students rarely have any notion of how search engines work or differ (I do often assign McClure’s Open Resource “Googlepedia” in my classes), and while my library focuses library instruction on information literacy, there isn’t as much support on what Silva calls “technology literacy” and “navigational literacy.” I think these issues can often be the source of much of the frustration students feel during the research process--a notion shown in the 3 observed students in Silva’s study. Reading this chapter has prompted me to have conversations with our librarians about this issue, and to be sure to provide this support to my students if they aren't receiving it elsewhere.

I was also really interested in Silva’s conclusion that “Students require instructional support in creating a well-defined and rigorous set of criteria for source evaluation” (p. 177). I am a big fan of the CRAAP test, or asking students to consider the currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, and purpose of a source. I appreciate Silva’s point though, that a generic rubric like this can only go so far and instead students need to be answering these questions in topic and discipline appropriate ways. This makes me consider asking students to discuss each of these criteria for their sources as they relate to specifically to their topic and help them determine criteria for what would be considered appropriate currency, authority, and purpose for their specific topic.

Helms-Park, R. & Stapleton, P. (2006). How the views of faculty can inform undergraduate web-based research: Implications for academic writing. Computers and Composition, 23,  444–461.

Helms-Park and Stapleton researched faculty opinions about web-based sources. Their research found that in contrast to students, many faculty are cautious of web-based sources, and were less likely to trust their authority than print sources. They were also wary of students ability to discern credible sources amid all the available information online. As I was reading this article eight years later, I found myself wondering, have things changed? Would faculty answer any differently these few years later? My inclination is that they wouldn't. One only needs to look to the recent conversation of Facebook experimenting with putting a “satire” tag on parody and satirical sources to help users determine how to read articles posted to see many people’s tendency to view anything printed or published as truth. In light of this tendency, like Silva, Helms-Park and Stapleton encourage the creation of tools to evaluate web-sourced.

However, while reading this article and seeing faculty responses to web-sources, I couldn't help also wondering if there might also be some elitism at work here. Wikipedia comes to mind. When I ask students what they know about Wikipedia, many of them immediately say that you shouldn't use it because the information may not be true because anyone can edit its entries. However, I don’t think this answer reflects students actual usage practices of Wikipedia. They are just telling me what they think I want to hear. While yes, Wikipedia can be suspect because of open editing, there are some really good Wikipedia sites, and wikis presents the opportunity for collective knowledge to be aggregated. In my class discussion of Wikipedia, I often frame my desire for students not to use Wikipedia as sources not because of inaccuracy, but because readers may perceive inaccuracies because of Wikipedia’s bad rap and this will then affect their own ethos. I guess what I am trying to get at is a tension in my own thinking on web-sources between wanting students to find credible information, but not privileging printed text and single authorship just because that is what has been valued previously.

Glassick, C. E., Huber, M. T. & Maeroff, G.I. (1997). Scholarship assessed: Evaluation of the professoriate. New York, NY: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.