Preface: my journey into research processes

It began with a revelation. After a two-year term in Africa teaching in a theological school, I took a Master of Library Science degree and started a dual appointment as Associate Professor and Librarian at a theological school. This unusual combination of roles - librarian and associate professor - led me to pay more attention to student research papers (undergraduate and graduate) than I had done in the past. Were my students optimizing library resources? Could inadequacies in the library collection be identified in student essays?

I wasn't expecting a revelation, but I was struck by one anyway. One day, I realized that my students did not know how to do research. If you're an academic, you may now be rolling your eyes in recognition that my epiphany was so obvious, even so mundane. Academics are well used to shabby, shallow research papers dashed off in the dark hours after midnight and proofread over breakfast cereal, if at all. We sigh in dismay at banal literature reviews that miss most of the literature and lack even a rudimentary goal. We have come to believe that many of our students are unmotivated, refusing to use whatever critical thinking their deity blessed them with. They do research badly, and we respond with low grades, sort of a passive-aggressive revenge game played out on every campus in the world.

But none of this speaks to my revelation - My students did not know how to do research. Motivation and procrastination aside, they simply did not know what they were doing. They were like clumsy bears at a dinner party, trying to play nice but knowing that a mess would ensue. My students were lost when it came to handling information, from beginning to end. The only conceivable reason why any research papers came out of them at all was either that they spent so many hours blundering through their process that something had to emerge, or they seized the first resources they could find and dashed off their assignments quickly, so as not to prolong the pain of working at a hostile, alien task. Sadly, it is often difficult for a professor to discern the difference, because a mediocre paper is easy to fudge.

The next revelation I encountered, soon after the first one, was that most of my fellow professors, me included, were doing little or nothing to help our students. To be sure, we were still assigning research projects, giving stern warnings about plagiarism and proper format, and telling our students that we wanted deep, critical thinking. But we were consistently sending them out into the research project wilderness like naïve Hansels and Gretels destined to be baked and eaten by the wicked witch.

Now, some 25 years later, I am still convinced of the truth of my revelation - most students do not know how to do research. While some things have changed, none of them are for the better.

The world's knowledge base has transformed itself from print to an increasingly digital format. The information environment in which we live has changed dramatically since the late 1980s, revolutionizing the way in which we function within it. Doing any sort of informational research today demands that we have a solid grasp of our new electronic environment, its search tools, the types of information we need to handle, and the methods of evaluation demanded to determine quality and relevance. The widely varied digital nature of the new information environment has made information-based research vastly more complicated than it was even in the 1980s.

Truth to tell, our students never did know how to do research well and we academics never did all that much to help them. But now that technology has made the information world many times more complex than it was, we have a whole generation of current and upcoming students who are just lost. What is even more chilling is the fact that academia itself has not yet recognized the problem.

The premise of this book is a simple one - the most glaring error in higher education's current struggle for relevance is our blindness to the fact that our students do not know how to do research, and we are not doing enough to help them. In this, I do not mean simply that our students turn in bad research papers. Rather, our students are not being taught how to handle information with understanding and skill. Either we sincerely believe we are already teaching them how to do this or we assume that our students will learn it on their own. But the plain and simple fact is that they are not doing so.

We are not teaching them how to formulate information problems, how to acquire the information they need to engage significantly with those problems, how to evaluate that information and how to use it effectively. This oversight is leaving our students unable to function as they should in the new information economy. The result is costly and damaging to most workplaces, not to mention the disservice we do to those who graduate from our institutions believing they are educated, when they are not.

Let's consider this from another standpoint. My premise is this: Our students do not know how to do research. If that is true - and I plan to demonstrate that it most certainly is - then we are failing to meet our own purpose as educators. We want to graduate students who understand their field and handle the information within it effectively, efficiently and ethically; we want students who are strong critical thinkers and lifelong learners, able to navigate the knowledge tasks required of their lifework. Yet our students are graduating without ever learning how to handle the information that will be their stock in trade.

Let me make an even more provocative statement: Students who do not know how to do research are not educated students. They may have a keen grasp of factual data; they may have memorized enough of the terminology to pass their exams and speak with seeming sophistication about their fields. But they are not educated, any more than filling your car with gas means that it knows how to make its own journey home.

In a world in which Wikipedia can help any intelligent person sound superficially like a university graduate, factual knowledge is a cheap commodity and can no longer be used as a substitute for a real education. Educating students these days is not just about knowledge transfer from the professor's brain to the student's, but also about knowledge navigation - about making something fresh out of what you know, about problem-solving in which information is less a treasure than a tool.

This book will contend that a student who does not know how to do research - identify a problem, determine the information needed to solve that problem, acquire that information skillfully, sift through and evaluate what has been found, then use that information critically to address the problem - is indeed not an educated person.

The irony is that today's higher education does everything but engage with this foundational skill and understanding gap. We teach students how to parrot our knowledge base. We teach them how to mimic the particular writing conventions of our discipline. We show them experimental method in the sciences and social sciences (while rarely having them perform any significantly original experiments until they are in graduate school). We teach them how to obey the rules of bibliographical format. We tell them to think critically (without giving them more than token exercises in doing so). But we do not help them learn how to handle information and genuinely engage in research.

Librarians like myself know the truth, even if we have not been able to communicate the seriousness of the situation to the rest of academia. We librarians see the challenge every day - hopeless, struggling students who have little clue where to begin or what to look for as they do their "research projects." In fact, there is a large literature on this topic, which is usually labeled "information literacy," but it is located within library literature, not that of higher education.

Faculty members, in turn, dismayed at the poor quality of student "research," are loath to waste time writing extensive comments on student papers. Thus professors are assigning fewer and fewer research projects, opting for reaction pieces, journals, book reviews and quizzes. Students who still do any significant research writing turn in papers with bibliographies that have a strong emphasis on web pages. We give them low marks and tell them to straighten up, but they don't. Why not? Because we have not determined how to teach them good methods, and students do not learn how to do research unless they are taught. So, instead of improving their research abilities, we tend to opt for giving them fewer opportunities to do research.

Is the problem as serious as all that? This question could be interpreted in a number of ways:

 Do our students really not know how to do research or is information handling a skill they inevitably acquire over time?

 Does skillful research really matter for students who are for the most part going into careers that demand few or no academic research projects?

 Is the new information environment so complex that special skills are needed by our students, without which they would be uneducated?

The...