Three Ways to Motivate Writers' "Need to Know" for Research Instruction
The first method takes motivational advantage of the likelihood that all eighteen-year-old American college students already probably have encountered a medical crisis or chronic condition in their immediate families. Modern medical emergencies or chronic conditions combine strong emotional motivation with a clear need for better sources of expert information. This method could be varied by using any other topic which typically produces intense emotional and intellectual stresses, and which typical freshmen already would have encountered. If a large paper would interfere with the work load of your syllabus, written "output" for this project also could take the form of a feature article for the Quindecim, a letter to an editor or a congressperson in a position to effect change, or some other genre that would add motivational force to the research instruction. Both motivations would prepare students to welcome the librarians' knowledgeable assistance, and successful completion of the task would encourage students to return for further instruction.
The second method begins with a short persuasive essay to connect writers emotionally and intellectually to a topic, and evaluates the essay to discover opportunities for improvement by using better, expert, but hard to find sources to replace popularly available and easily accessible ones. Topic choice is the key to getting writers emotionally and intellectually motivated. Usually two or more assignment sequences on differing topics, and resulting first drafts, produce the best odds for readying writers for research instruction. Improved grades in revision, which writers can directly relate to their improved research skills, add a second layer of motivation for continued learning which can bring them back to the librarians for more instruction related to subsequent papers.
The third method takes advantage of the growth of rich databases of primary source material about modern and early modern historical persons and events which students may have heard of, and it offers them the chance to become authorities in their own right based on primary source readings. Source quality in this instance can be measured by the date and nature of the source (e.g., personal letters, contemporary newspaper accounts). Students used to being fed predigested secondary source summaries of historical data can be strongly motivated to discover for themselves what past evidence is available for their topic. Some instructors will choose to search for and preview a list of topics before the semester begins in order to familiarize themselves with the available sources and ways to make sense of them, offering students a list of vetted topics from which they must choose. As in the case of the medical crisis, students frequently already have become interested in unusual historical events they know only through secondary sources, so the hunt for primary evidence can be a powerful motivator, and the opportunity to publish the result via an existing historical web site or historical society newsletter offers a strong secondary "carrot" to focus their efforts on the librarians' instruction.
All three of these methods can benefit from teaching students about the "ladder of expertise" by which non-experts can use increasingly expert sources to enable them to use the very best.
Using a Pre-Existing Medical/Scientific Crisis (thanks to Barbara Roswell!)--
Choose a scientific, medical or health-related phenomenon that is of interest to you that you will research and write about for the final portion of our class. This may be a disease or condition that affects you, a friend, or a member of your family, a form of exercise that interests you, a drug or medicine, or a substance or phenomenon that may affect your health (a pesticide, a food additive or process, etc.). I encourage you to choose a topic you care deeply about and to use this paper as an opportunity to learn more about the topic and perhaps to investigate options and solutions to a problem of concern to you. (Some possible topics: alternative treatments for Asthma, Alzheimer's, acupuncture, ADD diagnoses, treatments, and interventions, aromatherapy, food irradiation, shin splints, skin cancer, stroke...) Your goal in this paper will be to define the phenomenon, to address those questions of greatest interest to you, and to include evidence and explanations to support the conclusions you reach. Your questions may include:
What is this phenomenon?; When did it first attract attention?; What theories explain it?; What controversies surround it?; How has thinking changed about it?; What are the dangers or benefits associated with it or its treatment?; What are the short and long term consequences of this practice?; What is the best way to address a specific problem?; What is still unknown about this subject?; What remains to be discovered or resolved?
To address these questions adequately, you will need multiple appropriate print or online sources as well as one non-library source (an interview, a survey, etc.). When you have chosen your topics and made preliminary research to establish what you can find on your own, write a draft making the strongest point you can with the evidence you have been able to find. After we workshop and conference about these papers, finding their strengths and weaknesses, especially in the quality of their sources, the class will meet with the library's research instructors to help you improve your sources' quality until you can use at least some expert sources from their original publications. You are encouraged to identify and contact organizations that are concerned with and have expertise in this issue. The paper should conform to APA or MLA documentation style and should include an abstract, acknowledgements, subheadings, at least one table or figure, and a list of sources.
Using a Sequence of Linked Assignments--
Step 1: Choose a short article from the news that involves a controversy which is likely to be unknown to your students, but which will involve situations in which they likely could imagine themselves. Ideal topics tend to involve conflicts between individual rights and group or cultural values, like free speech vs. the rights of those injured by special types of speech, self-defense vs. the rights of the accused to due process and the rights of those who might be injured by self-defense. Then, lead a class discussion to show students how to analyze situations for how many ways we could improve or resolve the problems raised by the case. Pay special attention to the types of people involved, urging students to identify with their positions and to care about their needs as ways to develop theses and real audiences who need to hear them.
Step 2: Assign a short persuasive essay in which writers take a position about some aspect of the topic, based solely upon the article itself, and any other sources the students are able to find with their current research skills and habits of mind. Tell students these papers can be revised to improve their grades. Then, grade these essays on a "tough" scale, giving no reward for promising but unrealized reasoning or evidence, and pointing out specific places where the papers could use better, expert opinion and evidence to improve their ability to persuade their "best readers" (i.e., those persons in the story who need to know what the writers are saying). Emphasize quality of sources over quantity of sources to keep the research portion of the assignment at a manageable level for English 104. For English 105, you can increase the pressure to achieve a persuasive "preponderance of evidence" while keeping quality unimpeachably high.
Step 3: In conference or peer-editing workshop, ask students to identify a limited set of several kinds of expert information that would improve their papers' persuasive power, if possible indicating a kind of source, if not a specific source, in which the information might be found. Compile and send a list of these information needs, with students' names, to the library's research methods instructors. Make sure you give them enough lead time so that, when they meet with your class or with students in small groups, they can have pre-designed search strategies using the print and online resources they are trying to teach. Coordinating small-group instruction based on common types of resources may work better than asking the instructor to address a 15-person class, writer-by-writer.
Step 4: After writers have incorporated the better evidence into fully revised papers, grade the revisions with specific attention, for a significant portion of the grade, to the quality of the sources and the skill with which they were used. If the initial draft grading was tough enough, you will have plenty of room in which to acknowledge improvement without resorting to giving all improvements an "A."
Using a Hunt for Primary Sources Related to a Historical Event (thanks to Randy Smith!)--
Step 1: Students should be asked to chose either a U.S. event (pre-1950?) from a list you’ve created or to pick an event described in a Goucher library book. The event could be connected to a famous American’s life (e.g., an artist, politician, soldier, etc.) or to part of the historical fabric of this country, (e.g. The Emancipation Proclamation).
Step 2: Assign a short paper wherein the student must describe some differing description(s), opinion(s), interpretation(s), or conclusion(s) about the event that he/she found in reading several sources about the event.. Indicate that extra credit will be given to papers in this regard that include eyewitness accounts, concurrent reportage, or participants’ recollections of the events. Inform students that they are free to use the “public web” (e.g. Google), OLLI, and the library’s magazine databases to find their sources.
Step 3: After grading initial paper effort, inform students that they will have a chance to improve the quantity and quality of primary source references in their papers through the assistance of a Research Instruction session held at the library – leading to possibly an improved grade on a revised paper. Prior to that session, meet with students to identity aspects of or “players” connected with the event. Pass this information on to the librarian instructor a week in advance of the planned session.
Step 4: Encourage students to locate – with later assistance from the librarian instructor if desired – a historical society, organization, or caretaker group (for a historical site), related to the student’s chosen event. Those entities having web sites should be sought in particular. The class as a whole, or the instructor, or the individual student, could then judge whether it would be appropriate to offer the revised paper to the web site, society, museum etc. as an addition to their collection of information.