Research as a Process

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Texts such as They Say/I Say begin with the assumption that to enter a discourse community, to learn to write and speak as a participant, one must learn what David Bartholomae calls “the commonplaces, the texts, the gestures and jargon of the group.” That entry, though, is usually a slow and gradual process. Susan MacDonald suggests four points on a continuum to describe the path students must navigate to enter the academic discourse community:

1. nonacademic writing
2. generalized academic writing concerned with stating claims, offering evidence, respecting the opinion of others, and learning to write with authority
3. novice approximations of particular disciplinary ways of using and creating knowledge
4. expert, insider academic writing

First-year writing courses tend to focus on the first two points of the continuum. Students are often asked to write in a range of genres that include many instances of what MacDonald calls “generalized academic writing” and the argumentative “moves” made explicit by Graff and Birkenstein focus almost exclusively on this type of writing.

But as MacDonald’s continuum makes explicit, key to entering the academic discourse community is the need to learn the research conventions of scholars and to recognize how these conventions might be discipline-specific. To some, these differences across disciplines are so great as to call into question the ubiquitous general education research paper. Richard Larson went so far as to refer to the “so-called ‘research paper’” as a “non-form” with “no conceptual or substantive identity.” If the research assignment focuses too narrowly on finding and reporting information, on regurgitating data into templates, then Larson’s objection is valid.

Research assignments in first-year writing courses are certainly susceptible to the pressures of teaching the “format” of the generic research paper even when no such format exists, or rather even when a dizzying number and array of formats exist. The generic research assignment also confirms common misperceptions about research and writing; that they are simple tasks of gathering, organizing, and transferring to paper information that is already known. Instead, research is best taught as part of a course designed to introduce students to the discourse communities that form around specific topics. And research assignments need to emphasize the qualities that underlie research in all disciplines: intellectual curiosity and personal engagement.

Furthermore, research like writing is best seen as a process. Research abilities, like writing abilities, are neither separate nor linear. As the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) notes of its recommended information literacy standards, “many of the competencies are likely to be performed recursively, in that the reflective and evaluative aspects included within each standard will require the student to return to an earlier point in the process, revise the information-seeking approach, and repeat the same steps.” To teachers of writing this description will sound very familiar.

As with their ideas about writing, students often arrive in college with a very narrow sense of research. Their success at the university and as life-long learners will depend on their coming to see knowledge as both shared and created, and research and writing as epistemic and recursive, as ways not only of making sense of the world but of making the world.

Correlating Writing and Information Literacy Outcomes

(from the WPA Outcomes Statement and the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards)

Research Process
Writing

• focus on a purpose
• use writing and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communicating

Information Literacy

• defines and articulates the need for information
• reevaluates nature and extent of information need

Search Strategies
Writing

• respond to the needs of different audiences
• understand a writing assignment as a series of tasks, including finding, evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing appropriate resources

Information Literacy

• identifies a variety of types and formats of potential sources of information
• selects the most appropriate investigative methods or information retrieval systems for accessing information
• constructs and implements effectively designed search strategies
• retrieves information online or in person using a variety of methods
• refines the search strategy if necessary

Documentation
Writing

• practice appropriate means of documenting work

Information Literacy

• extracts, records, and manages the information and its sources
• acknowledges the use of information sources in communicating the product or performance

Recap of Composition Conversation-Effective Writing Assignments

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The most recent Composition Conversation focused on one of the most rewarding and difficult tasks faced by teachers of writing: designing effective writing assignments. Many of the ideas that emerged in the discussion applied not merely to designing writing assignments but to good teaching practice. Two key insights dominated: developing good assignments takes time and frequent revision, and students benefit when challenged to come up with their own ideas and their own way of presenting them.

The conversation began with a litany of best practices, some obvious, others less so. All agreed that assignments should be in writing and that instructors needed to devote sufficient class time to going over the assignment. The assignment should focus on what students were supposed to do (not simply what they were not supposed to do). If the assignment required a specific process, the assignment should specify those steps as explicitly as possible. As much as possible, the criteria to be used to evaluate the work should be made clear at the time of the assignment. One participant noted that students often use an assignment sheet like a recipe—the clearer and more explicit we can make our instructions and expectations, the better the results.

Where do the good assignments come from? Most participants could recall starting with writing assignments of their predecessors, colleagues, and possibly teachers. “The best teacher is the best student” is one formulation of this common adage. Another is “the best teacher is the best thief.” But participants noted that while good teachers might start with the work of others, they also personalize and refine assignments over time. Everyone could recount some terrible essay assignment they inflicted on students, but everyone could also recall “fixing” the “bad” topics through revision. One participant offered this instructive advice: make notes on a topic as you read student responses to it. These notes might address what students do well, what they do poorly, and how students might have misread the topic. The notes might be simpler: “Never use this topic again!” The key is recognizing that developing a good assignment is not very different from developing a good technical document—the teacher needs to know his/her purpose, his/her audience, and must be willing to test the document on actual users to find out whether it works, and use the feedback of readers to improve each draft.

What characterizes a good assignment? All agreed that good assignments allow students to develop their own ideas and their own ways of presenting them. Usually from the best of intentions assignments become overly directive and limiting, and substitute the instructor’s thinking for the student’s. “Helping” easily slips into “doing for.” Sometimes students are given little or no choice in their response and struggle to work within the narrow limitations of a single topic to which they must but cannot respond, or an overly simple task that leaves them with little to do other than repeat the argument of the assignment. Some participants noted that some students imaginatively go beyond a topic, but by doing so produce an essay that runs the risk of appearing “off-topic.” In portfolio-assessed classes, the danger is other readers might see such license as signaling an inability to respond to an assignment. But teachers can usually distinguish between innovation and inability. in short, students benefit from our high expectations and suffer when we oversimplify what is in fact complex.

Questions to Ask When Designing an Assignment

• What purpose are students attempting to accomplish with their writing?
• Who's the audience for their writing? How much do students know about this audience?
• How familiar are my students with this genre of writing?
• How long should the paper be? Why this length?
• What is the assignment’s central task? What at a minimum must they do?
• What might students find difficult about this assignment? How can I help them without limiting them?
• Is there a specific sequence of steps or process that will help students write a successful essay? Does this process allow opportunities for feedback and revision?
• What are my evaluation criteria? How well do these criteria line up with my goals for this assignment?
  

Questions a Student Might Ask of an Assignment

• What is the instructor’s purpose in creating this assignment? What am I supposed to demonstrate?
• What exactly am I supposed to do?
• What is the process? What steps are required to do the assignment properly?
• Who, other than the instructor, might read or use this document?
• How will the instructor know the best papers from the worst?
  

Designing Effective Writing Assignments

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The many pedagogic resources available on designing effective writing assignments mostly agree on the importance of beginning with three questions:

Why? Why are students being asked to write?

For whom? Who is the audience for the writing?

What? What form will the finished product take?

These three questions, of course, correspond to purpose, audience, and genre, and an effective assignment will help students identify the purpose, audience, and genre of their writing.

While instructors might believe that the purpose of an assignment is clear, most inexperienced writers have difficulty identifying their purpose for writing. Often they believe their purpose is to complete an assignment, which leads to safe and disengaged responses. Consider providing a succinct statement of purpose, such as “Your purpose in writing this essay is to identify the main proposals for transforming the Los Angeles River, and then argue for the approach that you believe will be most effective.”

Many instructors are already including information about audience in their topics. It is not surprising, for example, to find a statement like the following on an essay assignment sheet: “While it is tempting to think that you are writing to me, the instructor, you should consider the entire class to be your audience.” Such advice is certainly a start, but students often find imaginary scenarios helpful, such as writing a letter to a public official or submitting a report to a campus group. Such scenarios, while obviously artificial, help students recognize the demands that real audiences can make. Courses that incorporate community engagement move one step beyond these artificial “real-world” scenarios to actual writing tasks (such as producing memos, brochures, user instructions and other documents) produced for flesh-and-blood readers.

As to the form of the finished product, we can be most helpful to students by being as explicit about our expectations as possible without being so directive and limiting that students are left with a “fill-in the blanks” assignment. Format, page length, process, even “pet peeves” about style and grammar should be stated upfront. If I believe that the only appropriate use of the word “thing” in a student essay is a reference to a 1951 film about vegetable-based aliens, then I should state that expectation on the assignment. In short, if students are expected to use certain forms and follow certain conventions, they should be instructed to do so.

Thinking about these three questions is only one way of approaching assignment design. We might also think about the assignment as it might be seen by our students. From the student’s perspective, the key questions might be

1. What is the instructor’s purpose in creating this assignment? What skills, knowledge, and/or abilities am I supposed to demonstrate?
2. What exactly am I supposed to do? What is the central task?
3. What is the process? What steps are required to do the assignment properly?
4. Who, other than the instructor, might read or use this document?
5. How will the instructor know the best papers from the worst?
   

While effective writing assignments take time and effort to create, well-planned assignments are not only easier for students to do, they are easier for the instructor to grade.

Questions to Ask When Designing an Assignment

• What purpose are students attempting to accomplish with their writing? Is this purpose do able?
• Who's the audience for their writing? How much do students know about this audience?
• How familiar are my students with this genre of writing? What do they need to know about this genre to be comfortable and successful?
• How long should the paper be? Why this length?
• What is the assignment’s central task? What at a minimum must they do or what at a minimum must they address?
• What might students find difficult about this assignment? How can I help them without being overly directive and limiting?
• Is there a specific sequence of steps, or process, that will help students write a successful essay? Does this process allow opportunities for feedback and revision?
• What are my evaluation criteria? How well do these criteria line up with my goals for this assignment? Of these, which are most important?