Interrogating
the Question: How do Undergraduates Initiate Research?
Jo B. Paoletti
American Studies, University of
Maryland
Abstract
In this presentation I focus on how undergraduates approach research,
by investigating only a single step in that process - formulating the
question. The literature on undergraduate research and my own
experience with directing term papers and senior theses suggested that
many students founder at this early stage. Not surprisingly, students
with weak or poorly conceptualized questions typically find it more
difficult to successfully complete any of the subsequent steps in the
research process. I am interested in developing ways to introduce
students to scholarly inquiry by creating assignments that revolve
around their own questions, without necessarily leading to a formal
term paper or report.
The author gratefully acknowledges
the support of a grant from the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
program of the Center for Teaching Excellent at the University of
Maryland.
Background
I arrived at this project by walking backwards. As the director
of a two-year program that required students to complete a capstone
project at the end of their sophomore year, I was troubled by the
meager number of students who opted for a research project. These were
bright students and most were truly engaged by their studies, yet they
seemed reluctant – or even afraid – to choose a research capstone. The
first solution we attempted was the concept of “discovery” research, a
developmentally appropriate venture into primary sources for sophomores
in our program. In discovery research, the emphasis is on the process
rather than on the final project; students present their findings in a
poster-style showcase and writing is limited to journals and a short
final paper. The number of students indicating an interest in research
remained small. Thinking they needed more guidance at the proposal
stage, I inserted a proposal requirement into the third semester
curriculum and brought in librarians to provide bibliographic
instruction. The results were underwhelming; most students still
avoided research, and the few that selected a research project reported
being less satisfied with the results than their peers who selected
internships or service-learning projects. Taking one more step back
from the proposal, I decided to devote an entire semester (second
semester, freshman year) just to questions, in an attempt to understand
why bright students were finding research so difficult.
The Online Mentoring Process
There were 46 first-year students in the program, and we met as
a class for just one hour a week. Because of the limitations this
schedule imposed, I chose to lead students through the process of
generating and following questions using our online discussion board,
supported by the WebCT course management system. Each student had a
“private” discussion topic (accessible only by the student and myself),
which we had been using for weekly journals. At the beginning of their
second semester in the program, while they were still first year
students, I developed a series of journal writing prompts, which I
posted sequentially. As a student responded to the prompt, he or she
received feedback from me, followed by the next prompt. These prompts
led them through a series of steps from identifying an area of interest
to generating questions to trying to find answers and finally assessing
what they had learned through the process. This online mentoring
process proved to be very effective and surprisingly economical in its
use of my time. Most of the student’s entries were short, and it took
less than five minutes to read and respond to each one; many of my own
posts, such as the prompts, could be “cut and pasted” into a message in
a few seconds. Had I met face-to face with each student on a weekly
basis, I would have allocated longer appointment times (around 15
minutes), to accommodate the exchange of pleasantries and the
unavoidable eventuality of students running late. So in a typical week,
it took me less than four hours to read and respond to each student,
compared with an estimated eleven hours for face-to-face appointments.
The other implication of the online mentoring approach was that the
messages were available for me to retrieve for later use and analyzed
as data for this research project. (In accordance with the university’s
human subjects review policies, students were asked to sign a form
granting me permission to use their responses in this way.)
Journal Prompts
The prompts used for the journals are listed below. As a student
responded to each prompt, he or she would receive the next one in the
sequence.
Prompt #1
This week, I want you to start
thinking about what YOU really want to know. I want to know what you
really care about, what you read on your own, find out about on your
own. Maybe it is something that is easily recognizable as an academic
topic; most likely it isn’t. Maybe it is something you think of as
trivial. Maybe it is more than one thing. When you pick up the paper,
what section do you turn to? When you go to the library or a bookstore,
what is your favorite section? Do you remember being absolutely
fascinated with something as a child -- a museum you visited, a movie
you watched over and over, something you drew? When you flip through
the course catalog, what classes jump out at you as neat to take just
for fun?
Prompt #2
Brainstorm a list of 7 questions that
would relate to your area of interest. (If you have more than one area
of interest, choose just one for this exercise.)
Prompt #3
Sort your 7 questions into two groups:
· Those
which you think can be answered using existing sources (i.e., someone
has already done the research and published it, and you can find the
answer by looking it up somewhere) and
· Those that
you think have not yet been studied by anyone, so original research
would be needed to provide an answer.
Prompt #4
Pick one of the "existing sources"
questions and see if you can find the answer. In addition to "yes" or
"no", tell me -- how looking for an answer may have changed the
original question or how it was worded, and what other questions popped
up as part of the search.
Prompt # 5
When you have completed all of these
steps, you are ready to pursue this on your own, between now and the
end of the semester. Don't spend a lot of time on it, just follow your
own curiosity and try to be aware of what process you use. (What makes
a good question? How many different KINDS of sources can you use?) Just
check in with me every week in your journals. If you have a new
question you want to pursue, that's fine, but stick with it for the
rest of the semester.
Prompt #6 (final)
Assess where you are on the personal
journey following your burning "question". Do you see it as just about
over, with a new interest beckoning? Does it feel like just the
beginning? Was this extended focus on YOUR interests useful to you?
What could I have done to make it better? What could YOU have done to
make it better? PLEASE ANSWER ALL QUESTIONS!
Results
In this preliminary report, I am presenting only the results from the
first three prompts. (identify an area of interest, brainstorm seven
questions, sort the questions into “can look it up” and “needs original
research”).
Prompt #1 (identify an area
of interest)
The students’ responses could be sorted into five categories:
Idiosyncratic expertise (6 students): The typical student in this group
was already highly self-educated in a subject and was actively learning
more. The area of interest was either not academic or had not been
developed in an academic setting. Examples:
· military history
· sports
· celebrities
Academic (10 students): The student raised questions that originated in
a recent course or academic experience or which they connected to an
academic experience in the future, as in a course they were interested
in taking. Examples:
· U.S. history
· the Holocaust
· interpretation of dreams
Social Issues (3 students): The student had interest in a social or
ethical question that would require more than information alone to
satisfy. Examples:
· solutions to school violence
· materialism in American society
· the value of community service
Personal Issues (19 students): The student had questions directly
relating to his or her own life. Examples:
· finding a soul mate
· career and major decisions
· what caused a parent’s death
Scattered (8 students): The student had a mixture of interests and
questions that combined two or more of the other four categories.
Examples:
· forensics careers, “true crime” and
criminology (personal, academic and idiosyncratic)
· finding a major and the band Phish (personal
and idiosyncratic)
· Irish troubles, learning to play the
saxophone, U.S. history (social issues, idiosyncratic, academic)
Prompt #2 (List 7 questions
from one area of interest.)
All of the students were able to generate seven questions. More than
80% were very closely related to a single topic, as in the following
example from an “idiosyncratic expert” on cars:
· What does a carburetor do?
· What is the fastest street legal car
produced in the world?
· What is the difference between a turbo
charger and a super charger?
· How does a manual transmission work?
· What is the most expensive car produced
today?
· What does the alternator do and what does it
look like?
· What is the exhaust manifold and how can it
affect the speed of the car?
· Where did the term horsepower come from and
what is the difference between horsepower and torque?
· How many cars does Ferrari produce every
year, how many cars does Ford produce? Chevy?
· How much does it cost every month to lease a
new Corvette?
Seven of the 46 students were unable to restrict their list to a single
subject, as in this example:
· Do professional athletes make good role
models for children, consider many of them only care about money trash
talking, and participate in illegal activity?
· Do the TV ratings work, or should it be up
to the parent to supervise their child?
· Does violence in the media really affect
children’s actions?
· Do parents put too much pressure on their
kids to participate in sports?
· What about the 'silent games' (For one day
in Ann Arundel county, during all rec bball games, there was to be no
cheering whatsoever from the crowd)
· What do cartoons say about today's society?
Are they different from cartoons a few decades ago?
· Does the media give an accurate portrayal of
sex and drugs for teens today? How can we change that?
Finally, a few students produced nested lists containing as many as two
or three related questions per item, as in the case of this psychology
major with an interest in gender issues:
· How has the view of women changed on college
campuses nationwide since women started going to college? How
about just here at Maryland, or the eastern side of the U.S.? Are
women more respected now if they have gone to college? Are
non-college educated women respected less than non-college educated men?
· Why do some people (actually, *most* people)
think of some work as "men's work" (from mechanical/car garage work to
aerospace engineering) and other work as women's work (secretarial
positions, teaching, social work, etc).
· Are we experiencing any growth in any of the
"male-dominated" fields?
· Why is it that here on our very own campus,
in our very own scholars community, a program structured around the
needs of children (advocates for children) is so overwhelmingly filled
by females, and a science/technology program (science, space and
technology) is predominately male?
· What percent of college students, parents of
young and grown children, etc agree that the basic methods of child
rearing (boys get to play with trucks, girls play with Barbie dolls)
structures our society from the get-go to continue to fulfill these
gender roles in society? What percentage would agree that the
media adversely affects children and their view of the sexes in
relation to one another yet would refuse to install a v-chip or similar
restriction on their own televisions?
· What percentage of America’s population
(and, of particular interest to me, the college population) simply does
not care? Is the majority of these people white, male, and from
good backgrounds? Am I committing a large stereotypical judgment
myself by assuming this?
Prompt #3 (Sort questions
into two groups: “can look up the answer” or “needs original research”)
This exercise essentially required students to judge whether or not
secondary literature existed to answer their question. My intention had
originally been to use this as a step to identify a possible direction
for a discovery research project, using primary source, and to provide
students with a chance to recognize that some of their questions
required value judgments, not factual information. A few of the
students picked up on the second idea, as did this student:
“After going back to my previous journal, I realized that many if not
all of my questions were opinion. They can’t be answered definitely yes
or no, in fact they would probably be better debate questions.“
About half of the students had no problem sorting their questions, and
four of the 46 added new questions when they realized that none of the
first group would require original research. This student’s comment was
typical of these responses:
“Looking back on my questions, I realize that there have probably been
studies and research done on all of them that I could use to find the
answers. Here is a question that I had not had in my previous journal
but that I could use original research to find out the answer to: How
does the education system in my specific hometown compare to that of
other areas (both US and international)”
However, many of the other responses were surprising and puzzling.
Despite my having explained the difference between primary and
secondary sources and what I meant by “original research”, nearly half
of the students were unable to correctly identify which questions could
probably by answered by looking up existing information. Most of these
misplaced one or two questions; a few actually got them completely
reversed – including one of the brightest students in the class, an
excellent student with a 4.0 GPA.
Discussion
My discussion of these results falls into two general areas: student
interests and research aptitude or readiness. More specifically, I will
discuss what this research revealed about the kinds of inquiry that
might interest first-year students and how likely an individual student
might be to successfully pose and answer a research question related to
a topic of interest.
Student interests
I deliberately chose not to limit the range of possible topics because
I wanted to see how students would complete the tasks of posing,
sorting and pursuing questions under the best possible circumstances.
By letting them select their own topic, I hoped to eliminate one
barrier to research – lack of interest. Frankly, I had not expected to
learn much from the interests themselves, but I was mistaken.
First, I was surprised at the number of students (24 out of 46,
including the students who had multiple interests) who identified
topics that were essentially personal in nature. Most of these revolved
around the choice of a major and possible career directions, which was
to be expected from first year students, but about one third related to
other issues, ranging from religious beliefs to unresolved questions
about a parent’s accidental death. Nearly all of these students
apologized for selecting a topic that they thought I would consider
“mundane” or “unimaginative”, but it was clear that my invitation to
pick something really important to them was taken seriously.
This finding has implications for anyone who is teaching research
skills in a setting that does not require connection to an academic
subject. While students in a U.S. history course should focus on that
content, instructors in freshman writing or college skills courses may
wish to anticipate these interests and use them to teach research
methods. It stands to reason that a student will be more motivated to
learn to find and evaluate information when that information fills an
urgent need.
Second, I had expected more students to express interest in social or
political issues. Our first semester freshman composition course
includes a research-oriented segment on persuasive writing that
requires students to select a topic of interest, research and then
argue both sides. I had heard quite a few spirited discussions about
their topics and expected that some of that enthusiasm to continue into
the second semester for this exercise. However, this was the smallest
group of responses – only three out of 46 (seven, if multiple interests
are included). Based on their responses, it was not a matter of apathy,
but of other questions having high priority or interest.
Finally, I was surprised by the number of idiosyncratic expects in the
group, and also in their identity. How could I have predicted the
computer science major that was a walking encyclopedias on military
history? The mechanical engineer with a passion for popular culture?
The female accounting major who memorized baseball statistics and
dreamed for being an accountant for the Baltimore Orioles?
Research aptitude and readiness
Assuming they selected a topic that truly interested them, I was also
interested in using this exercise to identify good candidates for
discovery research projects or undergraduate research assistantships
and to assess what kinds of research instruction or support might
increase their chances of success. My long-range goal was to increase
the number of students who chose research projects in their sophomore
year.
Of the 46 students who participated in this exercise, eleven chose
research projects (one undergraduate research assistantship, seven
discovery projects and three who selected a research seminar modeled on
discovery projects and focused on the theme of the Cold War.). That
represents more than a 100% increase in the number of research projects
over the previous year. Most of them chose projects that continued the
investigations begun during this exercise. I have repeated the exercise
since then with another class of students, with similar results and
would consider this a successful outcome.
Could I predict which students turned out to be successful researchers?
In a word, no. Perfect hindsight, however, has given me a better sense
of what characteristics these young researchers may have.
1. Nearly all of them had initial questions that fell
into either the academic category or the idiosyncratic category. (This
accounted for only half of the students in those categories, however.
Most of the others chose internships.)
2. Only one of them had an initial question in the
personal category, which is significant because that was the largest
category. Students whose question had been of a personal nature were
evenly divided between internships and service-learning projects.
3. All of the students with complex, nested lists of
questions ended up doing research projects. The two most successful
research projects were done by students with complex lists.
4. The students who managed to accurately sort their
questions into groups were more likely to do research projects.
Summary and Conclusions
In summary, students expressing interest in academic questions, or
having idiosyncratic expertise in a subject were more likely to pursue
a research project than those whose chosen topic was personal. Complex
lists of questions, with several questions closely interrelated, were a
good predictor of research ability and interest. These findings are
fairly intuitive, although frankly, I would not have predicted the
success of the “complex list” students, because my initial reaction was
that they would have trouble narrowing their topic and finding a focus.
I am most intrigued by the results of the sorting exercise. Why did so
many of these students have difficulty with a task that I expected to
be easy? Is the difference the result of innate limitations such as
learning disabilities? Is it evidence of deficiencies in critical
thinking skills or lack of familiarity with information systems and
sources? What kinds of experiences or information would improve their
ability to assess the researchability of a question?
This method of mentoring students through a research exercise was
successful on two fronts. First, I was able to increase the number of
students electing research projects in their sophomore year. Second, by
analyzing these discussions and following the students longitudinally,
I have been able to gain considerable insight into difficulties that
undergraduate students have with defining a research question.
One important possibility for future inquiry is to focus on the sorting
activity, perhaps bringing it into a classroom discussion so that
students can see how other students approach the task. I have tried
this with a very small class (11 students) this spring and the result
was that students began to understand the meaning of the two categories
and how to predict whether a question might be answered by secondary
literature. I am also wondering where bibliographic instruction might
fit into this process, so that students would have a better sense of
the resources available for a particular topic. I would like to take a
closer look at the responses to this question to determine what sources
a student had in mind when they said a question could be answered by
“looking it up”. In more than one case, a student said one answer could
be looked up on the Internet, but another question required “original
research in a library”. Perhaps a phenomenological approach to student
accounts of their research projects would help reveal their mental maps
for the process!
Finally, I am becoming more curious about how pre-college research
experiences (high school term papers, senior theses or research
practica) prepare students for the college research experience.
Were some of the students better-prepared, more able researchers
because they had natural aptitude, or because they had good training,
or both? Did other students struggle with the tasks of coming up with
questions because they were less intelligent or less prepared?
This is a work in progress. Comments and questions are welcome.
Jo B. Paoletti
American Studies Department
Holzapfel Hall
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
301-405-6646
jpaol@umd.edu
Selected References on Undergraduate Research
Ford, J. E. (1995). Teaching the research paper : from theory to
practice, from research to writing. Metuchen, N.J., Metuchen, N.J.
Hauptman, R. (1998). "Bibliographic Instruction: A Failed Exercise."
Research Strategies 16(3): 235-236.
Kloss, R. (1996). "Writing things down vs. writing things up: Are
research papers valid?" College Teaching 44(1): 3-7.
Stein, L. L. and J. M. Lamb (1998). "Not Just Another BI:
Faculty-Librarian Collaboration to Guide Students Through the Research
Process." Research Strategies 16(1): 29-39.
Weimer, M. (1997). "Are Research Papers Valid?" The Teaching Professor
11(1): 5.