For the past six and a half years, I have been teaching Freshman about peer-review and how to find peer-reviewed articles through the library (or Google Scholar). I’ve developed all sorts of activities in different disciplines to get students thinking about audience, writing style, and the format of the articles they find. And every year, I become more and more convinced that having first-year students use peer-reviewed literature in their research is a terrible idea that takes the focus away from what is important for them to learn.
I have also sat at the reference desk for six and a half years helping first-year students find their required three peer-reviewed articles (sometimes more, sometimes less, but usually 3) for their papers that I know they probably won’t understand. Expecting a first-year student to be able to grasp literary criticism and science articles written for other PhD’s seems crazy to me. And the articles are usually so specific (like “Machines and Animals: Pervasive Motifs in ‘The Grapes of Wrath'” or “Chemical Recycling of Carbon Dioxide to Methanol and Dimethyl Ether: From Greenhouse Gas to Renewable, Environmentally Carbon Neutral Fuels and Synthetic Hydrocarbons”) that it’s rare to find a good fit for the students’ more basic topics in the scholarly literature. It becomes more about finding an article that is at least somewhat related to their topic than finding good evidence for their argument.
I don’t remember a professor in college ever requiring me to use peer-reviewed articles in my papers. I actually don’t remember there ever being specific requirements about sources in research papers. It was mainly about our writing and finding good sources that supported our argument. Maybe Wesleyan University is just a weird place (actually I know it is), but I think this strategy was right on the money, because it helped us to focus more on finding content that we both understood and that was useful to our research rather than focusing on finding a specific kind of research which we may not even have understood well once we got to reading it. Of course, I was in college back when the Web was new and no one in their right mind thought to use it as a research tool. Still, I think one can require students to use solid evidence for their argument without necessarily requiring students to use peer-reviewed literature.
I understand perfectly that faculty want their first-year students to find quality resources and they want their students to have an understanding of scholarly communication. But is the best way to do that forcing them to find scholarly articles for a research paper? That requires so many different skills that many of these students don’t have yet:
1. The ability to turn a topic into a search strategy
2. The ability to search in library databases
3. The ability to look at a citation and determine whether it is a scholarly journal or not (or maybe they’ve just checked a box in a database which means that they never need to learn this important skill)
4. The ability to read an abstract and determine whether the article is relevant to their topic
5. The ability to read a scholarly journal article and synthesize information from it
6. The ability to integrate evidence from the scholarly literature into their paper
7. The ability to write effectively
And making students do all that when usually they are only getting 1, 2, and 3 from the librarian and probably 7 from the instructor sends students a terrible message in their first year. Research is painful. Scholarly articles are impossible to read. YOU CAN’T DO THIS! The first year should be about showing students that they can do it. It should be about getting them excited about participating in research and contributing to the scholarly conversation. And that doesn’t mean making things easy, but it also doesn’t mean stacking the deck so much against students that they are soured on research. I remember Freshman year being a huge smack-down for me (a know-it-all 18-year-old who was academically a big fish in a small pond during high school), but while I remember realizing how little I knew, I also felt very engaged with the research I was doing. I was reading things deeply, trying to make novel arguments, and was thinking about issues from multiple points of view. Research was about expanding my horizons and I just wonder if that’s the effect the sort of research assignments I tend to see first year students doing today has on them.
Another thing that the focus on requiring students to only find peer-reviewed sources does is that it distances them from research and information literacy. Information literacy should be seen as a life-long process of information seeking. Information literacy is about finding reviews of cell phones to choose the best one for you. It’s about researching an illness you were just diagnosed with. But when the focus is on telling students that the only quality stuff comes from the peer-reviewed literature, we are distancing what students learn in school about information literacy from what they will do in the real world. Information literacy instruction should be relevant to students’ lives and help them develop transferable skills, but in so many cases, the assignment the students have forces us to focus on getting them through a single class, rather than on giving them skills they can use later on.
What should first-year students focus on in terms of writing and research? Well, I think it’s great to have them do a lot of writing, and a lot of it should be focused on different types of writing, not just research papers. They need to develop their ability to make an argument without focusing on integrating evidence. And students can learn how to integrate evidence even without doing any searching. Instructors can provide sources that allow students to write an argumentative paper where the focus is on synthesizing what they’ve read and integrating evidence into their paper. And it’s easier for faculty to assess how they did if they’ve actually read the articles. I think they also should learn about scholarly communication, but not through an assignment that requires them to find, read and use peer-reviewed journal articles. I love what Kate Gronemyer and Anne-Marie Deitering described in their article “Beyond Peer-Reviewed Articles: Using Blogs to Enrich Students’ Understanding of Scholarly Work”, where they had students in first-year writing classes read blogs by scholars in specific disciplines to understand scholarly communication. By using something familiar to students (blogs) they can focus on learning about scholarly communication rather than focus on learning how to read peer-reviewed articles. It also can get them to see themselves as researchers who can contribute to the conversation. It makes it all so much more accessible. I also love the idea of giving all students in a class peer-reviewed articles from different disciplines and have them analyze them together. It can not only help them to understand and dissect peer-reviewed literature, but it can also show them the differences in scholarly communication in different disciplines. Students need to learn how to read, analyze, evaluate and synthesize information from the scholarly literature, and I don’t think those learning goals are met by most research paper assignments. I think some focus on understanding the different types of journal literature and the audiences for each would also be valuable, but their understanding of that can be assessed by activities where they have to find different types kinds of sources or where they have the sources already (or even just citations) and have to figure out what they are. I’d want students to develop the component skills necessary to make them successful at writing a research paper before they are actually asked to do so.
And probably most librarians know all this already. Unfortunately, we’re rarely the ones developing assignments. And while some of us have good relationships with our faculty where we can make suggestions, many, even the most diligent liaisons, don’t. I really appreciate the point-of-view of our newish head of the Center for Online Learning at PSU who sees librarians as having a critical role in assignment design, and feels that faculty should always consult with their subject librarian when they are developing research-related assignments. I love this idea, but know that we couldn’t be further from most faculty members’ minds when they are developing assignments (probably a few days before the start of classes). We’re lucky at PSU in that our year-long Freshman Inquiry program is focused on the development of core skills already, so I don’t know if this problem is as big as it was at Norwich, but after seeing a gaggle of first-year students in another discipline this week coming to the reference desk needing peer-reviewed articles on their topic (and not knowing really what that even meant), I know it’s a problem at least in some quarters.
How have you dealt with this issue at your institution? Have you been able to get through to disciplinary faculty? What strategies have you used to develop these valuable skills in students in spite of the existence of bad research assignments?
You’re 100% right! The approach taken by myself and my colleague at GVSU, Hazel McClure, was to create a rubric for research assignment design. It’s meant to be generally applicable across the curriculum, but it does have a bias towards improving formal, traditional research paper assignments. We’ve been thinking about how we might expand from that to a more explicit encouragement of more creative approaches. Suggestions are welcome!
http://www.gvsu.edu/library/rgr
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I agree with you completely. I’m curious how the faculty reacted to your posting – or have they reacted? Do they agree? I think tying this into Info Lit was really smart because that makes the argument for no peer-reviewed even more valid. Info Lit is an ongoing process. Thanks so much for this.
What faculty do you mean, Lorraine? This wasn’t directed towards any specific faculty members and certainly not at PSU, because this is the first semester I’ve been teaching here. It’s more about college-level research assignments for first-year students in general. I wrote this to discuss it with other librarians and see what thoughts they have on dealing with this issue.
I couldn’t agree more. My new job involves more teaching than the previous lost four years, and I just went through my first wave of teaching freshman writing courses and was amazed about the disconnect between the requirements for the assignments and the assignments themselves. There’s such artificiality to demanding x-number of articles from y-kind of journals.
Fortunately, several of the faculty I dealt with weren’t so strict and were open to other sources. But, on the whole, I agree that instructors need to work more closely with librarians on research-based assignment design.
Sing it, sister! I got to help create our new gen ed program and one thing I pushed hard was to move the use of peer-reviewed articles out of the freshman year and into the sophomore year. Even sophomore year is pushing it of course- especially when they have a scientific or medical topic- but one of the issues we had to face was that the faculty want the students to enter their major with all these background reading/writing/research skills already in place. They are very resistant to spending class time on anything but content, and fully expect students to be able to find and identify scholarly research articles independently. For most universities, freshman composition is the course that is supposed to set all of that up. I don’t think it’s the freshman comp instructors we have to convince that this is not ideal- it’s the rest of the faculty.
I SO agree with you, Meredith, and I’m glad someone finally spoke out on this topic. I work at a two-year technical college in which students are here for specific programs but must take a few required “gen ed” courses — things like Intro to Sociology or Intro to Psychology. Most of these students are not planning on an advanced academic career.
Students come in looking for their required peer-reviewed articles, and often it’s only one article, which they are required to find and summarize. When I help them with a database search, I feel almost embarrassed at the results lists of obscure, complex, highly specific articles I’m leading them to.
The students just pick one, any one, because they have to, their main concern being that the article be as short as possible so they have less to wade through. I can see that all they are doing is trying to fulfill the requirement of the assignment and are probably not learning anything from it except that these articles are impossible to understand. And they are way too specialized for the introductory nature of these courses.
I suppose this is the instructors’ overeager attempt to keep the students away from some of the flimsy stuff they find by just Googling. Often these are instructors who are reluctant to “give up class time” to schedule a library/research orientation. In many cases I don’t think they themselves know what sort of literature is out there.
I haven’t expressed my opinion to these instructors, figuring it’s their course and I’d be seen as overstepping my bounds. I have succeeded in getting more instructors to schedule sessions and have educated them better as to what can be found in our databases. But this “scholarly journal” assignment is misguided, and I’m glad you posted about this!
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Another person chiming in to say I agree! I don’t remember doing research papers as such until I was at least a junior in college. What we did was read assigned articles, discuss them as a class, and write papers showing that we synthesized the information, and could (hopefully) draw some original conclusions from it. Exactly what you suggest here, and exactly the right way to learn. Independent research came after we learned to think the way people our our field(s) think.
Great article Meredith and great timing. This coincides nicely with an article in The Chronicle called ‘Citation Obsession? Get Over It!’ (http://chronicle.com/article/Citation-Obsession-Get-Over/129575/), which is another things that drives me crazy about many of the assignments students have to do.
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“Of course, I was in college back when the Web was new and no one in their right mind thought to use it as a research tool.”
I am wondering if it is the Web itself that has pushed research assignments in this direction? Students are going online no matter what. Is an insistence on peer-reviewed articles an (admittedly insufficient) attempt to impose some kind of quality control on the sources students use?
I also remember using only books as sources for research papers, except for articles that were assigned reading.
But how do you address the concept of reliability and credibility and TMI? At my school, we have instructors that do require peer reviewed for papers in freshman writing courses. To me, the why is quite obvious. These sources have gone through an evaluation process. Editors, experts have reviewed the article, the data, and conclusions. Being able to evaluate a source is a huge skill, a lifelong skill. If you have one less source to scrutinize for veracity, doesn’t that make things easier? As for first year students being able to read a scholarly journal article, I think they are up for the challenge. How else will they grow intellectually if not given challenging material?
@Elizabeth, are you saying that peer-reviewed journal articles can always be trusted because they’ve gone through the peer-review process? Then you haven’t seen all of the high profile cases in the past decade where scientific journals have published retractions because of fraudulent or just bad information in peer-reviewed articles. There’s a good article about this in Nature. In many cases, it was bloggers who discovered the problems with these articles. Then there was this article in the Guardian that looked at the proliferation of peer-reviewed journals in the sciences and some of the garbage articles that get published in them. To me, it makes so much more sense to teach students to be critical of everything they read/hear because there is NO one type of content that is 100% trustworthy. With peer-reviewed articles, they should be looking at the research methodology to determine whether they feel like the results are trustworthy and/or generalizable. Teaching them that peer-reviewed sources are always good and can be trusted and everything else requires evaluation tells students that it makes more sense to go for the peer-reviewed stuff because they don’t have to evaluate it. That not only narrows their horizons in terms of finding information, but also it’s simply not true that all peer-reviewed articles are trustworthy or good.
These skills all need to be scaffolded, and that means not expecting students to demonstrate their mastery of every major information literacy skill in their first-year papers.
I’m so glad you’re addressing this issue. Ijust got through teaching a class where the instructor requires her students to find three scholarly, peer-reviewed sources on topics such as “How to change an automobile tire,” “How to set a proper table,” and “How to train a pet.”
I agree with everything you’ve said, but I feel it’s less of a pedagogical issue and more of a communication issue with faculty. I know this post is directed at librarians, but I think faculty need to hear it more. We know what we do, because we’re on the front lines of fielding student research questions. But faculty aren’t on the receiving end of what they assign, and some don’t understand our function as it relates to the institution as a whole. Have you considered sharing this with them?
Oh Alyssa, I have SO been there, but usually our students needed peer reviewed articles on ultimate fighting and other contact sports-related topics. Sigh…
I agree Karen that this is a major communication issue, but I think that librarians need to have a clear idea in their own minds about how information literacy instruction SHOULD be scaffolded throughout a students’ academic career so that they can make the most appropriate (and detailed) suggestions to faculty. At my library, we are currently developing learning outcomes for our instruction program to inform our teaching and assessment. The next step is to map them to curriculum in our General Education program and in the disciplines. It gives us a clear roadmap for our teaching, but it also gives us a clear roadmap for where we need to work collaboratively with faculty to improve student learning.
@Meredith Did you see today’s NYTimes about the psychologist? A great story! Things get studied, published, believed as fact until disproven and then retracted all the time. So goes the cycle of knowledge. Hooray for bloggers who double check these articles and sniff out the rats. I think there are even a few Nobel prize winners who have since been debunked and I’m all for that. Information needs to be questioned; how else would we get knowledge?
I am not saying that peer-reviewed articles are always good and are trustworthy absolute. You can’t really say that about anything. But, as an example, what about doctors in hospitals or teachers in school? You expect them to be trained and have experience. And it’s understood that a doctor or a teacher would not be in a hospital or in front of a classroom without having gone “evaluative process” that includes peers. Yes, sometimes there are bad doctors and teachers out there, but it does not mean you can’t use a hospital or go to school. With all the millions of sources out there, it can be beneficial for a student to know that some sources do go through an evaluation beyond spell check. Isn’t that why we want them in a library? To use resources selected on their behalf, evaluated for them? We are trained for that and students should feel confident that we know what we are doing, just like a doctor. Peer reviewed journal articles can offer that to students, even first year, and that’s what I find useful. It’s ain’t perfect but it can work.
It would take me some time to find the kind of “blogs” referred to by Gronemyer & Deitering and I have a hard time imagining a first year student finding them. Although I do believe these students are savvy enough, so it could happen. With my students, I try to explain all the types of sources (from books to blogs) that are available to them. But I always tell them that they have to make decisions about what to use for what they are doing; that they are in control of their research.
Beyond the semantics of this issue and whether we agree about peer review sources, I think @Karen may be right, the problem lies with faculty. They may be a little too target-fixated on this type of article because it was probably the way they did things. I’ve found that many instructors haven’t changed their assignments and requirements in years. I’ve even seen some that still refer to microfilm!
I am a high school librarian at a private, college prep school. Our 11th grade English classes prepare a thesis-driven research paper on a work by an American author. We emphasize the use of a variety of sources including online databases and peer-reviewed journals both in print and online. We do this because we know that in college professors will expect freshman to have some familiarity with peer-reviewed sources and our graduates always come back and tell us how happy they are that they had this training. This is just another viewpoint. I also read the post on “Citation Obsession” and found it to be very good from the point of view of what is more important learning for the sake of learning or learning to keep from failing a course.
What a coincidence! We just decided to create a brochure and possibly a PowerPoint for instructors about when to require or not require scholarly sources. We too often get students who need to find things like the causes, symptoms, and treatment of a disease, which they will find in a medical encyclopedia, but they say they have to have a scholarly journal article.
I think many of the instructors who say “scholarly articles” simply want their students to use reliable sources. They are also usually more flexible than the students realize.
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I suppose I don’t need to add my “amen” to the others, but I will. Like many others, we deal with this every semester and if they were situation where a lot of thought and work was being put into the assignment by the faculty member to really teach students about peer reviewed articles, then I might feel that it was worthwhile. In my experience, however, this doesn’t happen a lot. I also think that faculty need to take into consideration just what kind of writing that graduates from their program will do (idea that I read someplace else or here?). I’d be willing to be that in most cases it wont’ be writing scholarly articles so why not teach them how to search for and evaluate all different kinds of information?
These are college students you’re talking about, right?
I apologize if my incredulity sounds like sarcasm, but I’m shocked that freshman college students have that much trouble working with peer-reviewed material. I teach research and information skills to *high school* students, and my goal is for the graduating class to be able to do all 7 of the items on your list.
If university librarians think professors expect too from college students (even freshmen) when they ask them to incorporate peer-reviewed material into their research papers, I think your article says less about source requirements and more about the failings of the US education system.
I couldn’t agree more. I’ve always thought that we need to be focusing more attention on upper-level undergraduate classes within their major (i.e., “research methods” classes), and that’s where this should start happening .. that way, it’s an introduction to what will hopefully some day become their own scholarly peers writing in their own field of interest. But it takes even more coordination and effort to develop a tiered approach to IL, and I’m fairly convinced that it requires some serious grassroots support from faculty or interest from the higher ups in the administration to make that happen.
When this does come up in first-year classes (as it often does), I usually encourage them to either pick what they can out of the article (from the abstract, introduction and/or conclusion, usually), or if it’s a science topic, have them look for review articles, which are usually on a broader subject, and have wonderful bibliographies to cherry-pick from.
But you do have to wonder about the professors who end up with these somewhat-random journal articles thrown into a paper and not restructure the criteria for the next semester..
I think the biggest hurdle in reading peer-reviewed articles is the specialized vocabulary. Scholarly sources are for specialists, or at least for people with a strong background in the subject. As a freshman, you don’t have a strong background (yet) in ANY subject — it’s not a question of intelligence; it’s a question of exposure. I couldn’t read library science articles when I started library school, either.
Great post! You make a lot of excellent points. I came here from today’s blog post over on Inside Higher Ed.
I just noticed that the link to the Gronemyer and Deitering article is now broken. Looks like the new url is http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/portal_libraries_and_the_academy/v011/11.1.deitering.html
@Brian, I think it’s wonderful that some high schools are working to help students develop those skills before college, but I wonder if that’s more the exception than the norm. High school for me was more about rote memorization than analysis or evaluation, and many of my colleagues have echoed those experiences. I was a high achiever in high school and still going to college was like getting smacked in the face as I felt unprepared for the kind of reading and thinking I needed to do. And I was one of those lucky people who was always comfortable writing, but so many college students really have to learn college-level writing as well. If we want to improve retention, we have to figure out how to scaffold the development of these skills.
@AK, I totally agree that asking people to read peer-reviewed journal articles without the disciplinary background (especially in certain fields) is really asking a lot.
Thanks for the tip, Andrew — I just fixed the link!
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