Studying Students
The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester
edited by
Nancy Fried Foster and Susan Gibbons
Association of College and Research Libraries
A division of the American Library Association
Chicago 2007
Edited by
Nancy Fried Foster
Susan Gibbons
Studying Students:
The Undergraduate Research Project
at the University of Rochester
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National
Standard for Information Sciences–Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI
Z39.48-1992. ∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Studying students : the Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester / edited by
Nancy Fried Foster and Susan Gibbons.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8389-8437-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. University of Rochester. River Campus Libraries--Case studies. 2. University of Rochester-
-Students--Case studies. 3. Academic libraries--Use studies. 4. Report writing. 5. Research. 6.
Study skills. I. Foster, Nancy Fried. II. Gibbons, Susan (Susan L.), 1970-
Z733.U868S78 2007
025.5’877--dc22
2007028559
Printed in the United States of America.
11 10 09 08 07
5 4 3 2 1
Contents
v
Introduction to the Undergraduate Research Project
Nancy Fried Foster and Susan Gibbons
1
one. Faculty Expectations of Student Research
Barbara Alvarez and Nora Dimmock
7
two. Asking Students about Their Research
Vicki Burns and Kenn Harper
16
three. Night Owl Librarians: Shifting the Reference Clock
Suzanne Bell and Alan Unsworth
20
four. Library Design and Ethnography
Susan Gibbons and Nancy Fried Foster
30
five. Dream Catcher: Capturing Student-Inspired Ideas for the Libraries’ Web site
Jane McCleneghan Smith and Katie Clark
40
six. Photo Surveys: Eliciting More Than You Knew to Ask For
Judi Briden
48
seven. Mapping Diaries, or Where Do They Go All Day?
Katie Clark
55
eight. What an Experience: Library Staff Participation in Ethnographic Research
Helen Anderson and Ann Marshall
63
nine. Then and Now: How Today’s Students Differ
Sarada George
72
ten. The Mommy Model of Service
Nancy Fried Foster
79
eleven. Conclusion: Creating Student-Centered Academic Libraries
Susan Gibbons and Nancy Fried Foster
84
References
88
Author bios
Before we embarked on our study of how un-
dergraduates at the University of Rochester
research and write their papers, we needed a bet-
ter sense of what students are asked to do when
they are assigned research projects. Moreover,
we needed more knowledge of the expectations
of the faculty and instructors who evaluate the
results of their work. Is there any consistency of
those expectations across the institution or across
disciplines? What kind of research materials are
students expected to find and work with? What
is a good research paper, anyway? We hoped that
by answering these questions we would not only
gain insight into what students are expected to
accomplish but also discern the most effective
ways librarians can help students meet faculty
expectations for research papers and become
adept researchers.
Findings of Previous Studies
Several studies have looked at faculty expectations
of students’ research using a variety of meth-
odologies. Valentine (2001) interviewed both
undergraduate students and their professors to
identify connections, if there were any, between
faculty expectations and student commitment.
She found that faculty members assign research
papers for a variety of reasons, including provid-
ing students with the experience of writing in
the discipline and giving them a chance to be
creative. They grade those papers on the basis of
subjective,intangible factors including “legitimate
effort”(110).This led Valentine to conclude that
faculty members have varied, and sometimes
vague, expectations of student work, but that
students strive to discern those expectations in
order to get good grades.
A study at Bucknell University (Carlson
2006) showed that faculty expectations vary ac-
cording to the academic discipline and, in gen-
eral, are lower for introductory courses. Carlson
looked at the citation behavior of students by
class year and academic disciplines and con-
cluded that instructors’ expectations increase
as students progress through the curriculum
of their major. Te academic discipline of the
course students were enrolled in also proved
an important factor. Students in humanities
courses focused heavily on books. Students in
social science courses cited more journal ar-
ticles and websites and overall included more
sources than students in the humanities and in
foundation seminars.
Another study of the citation behavior of
undergraduate students (Davis 2003) revealed
the positive effect of faculty guidelines for
research on the types and overall number of
sources used. Davis looked at the bibliogra-
phies of students in an elementary economics
class and discovered that the number of book
citations dropped from 30 percent in 1996
to 16 percent in 2001, which he attributed to
one. Faculty Expectations of Student Research
Barbara Alvarez is Modern Languages and Cultures Librarian at River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester;
e-mail: balvarez@library.rochester.edu. Nora Dimmock is Head, Multimedia Center at River Campus Libraries,
University of Rochester; e-mail: ndimmock@library.rochester.edu.
Barbara Alvarez and Nora Dimmock
1
2
Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester
increased use of the Internet. However, when
the professor provided guidelines on appro-
priate research sources, the number of Web
resources dropped dramatically. Davis’s study
demonstrates how clearly stated faculty expec-
tations can have a direct impact on students’
attempts to find and use relevant scholarly
literature.
Te effect of library instruction on student
research skills was the focus of a 2002/3 survey
(Singh 2005). Singh surveyed more than four
hundred faculty members teaching undergrad-
uates. Although 55.2 percent of faculty believed
that library instruction improved students’ re-
search processes and 33.8 percent “found their
students’ research skills to be poor,” only 8.6
percent made library instruction a part of their
coursework. Singh concluded that many faculty
members expect students to have better library
skills but few provide the necessary library in-
struction.
Methodology of Our Study
With the information from some of these past
studies in hand, we sought a means to explore
the expectations of the University of Rochester
faculty for their students’ research and writing
abilities. To obtain the most exhaustive and, at
the same time, most spontaneous answers to our
questions, we opted for face-to-face interviews
with faculty. A group of subject librarians vol-
unteered to identify professors who had assigned
research projects during the current semester
and to approach them with interview requests.
Fourteen faculty members from a wide range of
academic disciplines (six in humanities, five in
social sciences, and three in science/technology)
agreed to participate in our study.
All of the librarians who volunteered to con-
duct faculty interviews attended a short training
session in ethnographic interview techniques
with the libraries’ lead anthropologist. An inter-
view protocol provided us with the main points
Table 1.1. Summary of Faculty Interview Responses
Hallmarks of a good paper
• meets goals of the assignment
• good topic: doable and interesting
• well thought out: clear thesis statement, well-developed arguments in relation to the sources used
• well written: no mechanical errors (grammar, spelling); appropriate style for the discipline; appropri-
ate style and content for the intended audience
• well organized and presented: beginning, middle, end; right things in the right section of the paper
• appropriate, high-quality sources
• no plagiarism
• shows understanding of the subject, critical thought, interest, and creativity
How students are supposed to find resources
• independently
• work with other students
• follow instructor’s suggestions on how and where to find sources (on syllabi, handouts, writing
guides, and at individual meetings)
• use skills learned in a bibliographic instruction session
• ask a librarian for help
• use library’s tools and services: databases, catalogs, interlibrary loan
• follow references cited in the textbook and other readings
• get resources from instructor’s own collection of books and articles
• use Internet (as long as the quality of visited sites is acceptable)
Faculty Expectations of Student Research
3
for discussion but also left room for any addi-
tional questions and comments the conversation
would afford. Most of the subject librarians took
advantage of this excellent opportunity and
learned a great deal about student-faculty inter-
action—much more than we had anticipated at
this early point in our project.
Te timing of the interviews was crucial.
Aiming for the end of the semester, when pa-
pers would be due, ensured that most of the
faculty were engaged in the process of grading
the research assignments and therefore could
provide us the most authentic and detailed
information. But this timing also created a dif-
ficulty because our demand for their time was
an added burden. We approached faculty with
a strict time limit of forty-five minutes and
reassured them at the beginning of the inter-
view that we were cognizant of their time con-
straints and would be diligent in keeping to our
agreed-upon time limit.
Interview Protocol
Our interview protocol had us focus on faculty
members who expected to receive research papers
from students within a few weeks.We asked them
Table 1.1. Summary of Faculty Interview Responses
What librarians can do to help students
• show how to search subject-specific and interdisciplinary databases
• create guides to subject literature
• explain different research methodologies
• restructure bibliographic instruction: offer more frequent and shorter sessions, more focused on a
particular type of resource
• offer library tours at the beginning of the school year
• work closely with faculty
• help with identifying print sources and finding them in stacks
• help with interlibrary loan requests
• encourage persistence, nurture excitement for the topic
• offer reserves and required readings in multiple copies
• help with writing problems
Obstacles to good research papers
• poor time management skills
• problems with formulating arguments and developing a topic
• lack of critical judgment and of reflection upon the sources
• poor understanding of the material
• poor writing skills: declining grammar, inappropriate style for the discipline, no previous experience
in scholarly writing, lack of clarity
• plagiarism, often unintentional
• poor choice of topic and lack of focus
• giving up easily
• not enough or poor-quality sources
• pursuing only sources in our collection or online (not using interlibrary loan)
• no experience in working with primary sources
• intimidation by resources
• not knowing how to work with references or cite sources
4
Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester
about the hallmarks of a good research paper in
general, and what they would look for in this
term’s papers. We also asked how these faculty
members expected students to find books and
articles as they worked on the assigned papers,
and whether they expected students to get help,
and from whom. Finally, we solicited ideas on
the ways librarians at the reference desk might be
most helpful at this point in the semester, when
students were writing their research papers.
Findings
The results of faculty interviews were collected and
disseminated to the project team. After looking
at the tabulated results we immediately realized
that, although there were common threads across
all the interviews, our study revealed no evidence
of any significant consistency of faculty expecta-
tions,either across the institution or at a discipline
level.There were also as many distinct answers to
each of the questions as there were interviews,and
some were even contradictory (see Table 1.1).Such
lack of consistency—confirmed later in interviews
with students—often puts undergraduates at a
loss when they are trying to understand what
scholarly investigation and writing are all about.
Professors agree that high school training is far
from sufficient in preparing students for research
pursuits at the college level. For example, two of
the interviewed professors told us that they do not
expect undergraduates to know how to find books
and articles, and that they tend to provide all the
materials necessary for the students’ projects.
By and large, professors expect students to
understand the purpose of the assignment,
choose an appropriate topic, and write a cogent
and well-supported paper. Frequently men-
tioned hallmarks of a good paper include an
interesting topic, high-quality sources and their
proper attribution, demonstrated understanding
of the subject and critical thought, well-devel-
oped thesis and argumentation, good organiza-
tion and presentation, and impeccable writing.
Te faculty members share the general opin-
ion that graduate students know how to do
research, but they are unable to articulate to us
how the students attain these skills as under-
graduates. Some instructors assume that librar-
ians are teaching research methods at some
point, even if the instructors themselves do not
request such instruction for their classes. Some
assume that a required writing course or a sin-
gle library session (or both) is sufficient as a ba-
sis for the student’s entire college career. Con-
sequently, most of the interviewed instructors
expect their undergraduate students to know
how to find research materials without ever
teaching these skills or having any clear idea of
how students are supposed to learn them.
In many cases, however, faculty expectations
go beyond the mere basics of research and writ-
ing. One faculty member explained, “Actually,
I expect the students to do something similar
to what I do, which is a combination of library
resources, … and what can be found on the In
-
ternet, and work with references.” Not surpris-
ingly, professors implicitly wish that students
imitated their own research and writing styles.
Yet their ways of conducting research are highly
individual and often rely heavily on sources
unavailable to students (e.g., peer groups)
rather than on traditional library-based tools
(Washington-Hoagland and Clougherty 2002,
127). Although they are experts in their own
fields, faculty members are not necessarily ex-
pert searchers or heavy users of library catalogs
and databases, and therefore they may not be
prepared to train students in information-find-
ing skills (Barry 1997). At the same time, many
are also reluctant to give up scarce class time for
bibliographic instruction offered by a librarian.
Even though the faculty members all agreed
that locating appropriate scholarly sources is
important, their opinions are divided as to the
students’ skills at finding good resources. Some
professors believe that students are quite re-
Faculty Expectations of Student Research
5
sourceful and able to find things independently.
Others assume that students are already famil-
iar with the databases and Web resources in the
subject area. Some do not expect students to do
independent research; instead, these instruc-
tors provide students with all the materials they
need or direct them to selected subject bibliog-
raphies. In the minority of classes where bib-
liographic instruction is taught by a librarian,
the instructors believe the session in the library
gives the students sufficient training in the use
of subject-specific databases and prepares them
to become proficient searchers.
When discussing their expectations, faculty
commented more extensively on the problems
of writing and critical thinking than on those
related to locating the right sources. Evaluat
-
ing and interpreting the information appear
much more difficult for students than finding
it. Without exception, all interviewed fac-
ulty agree that one of the main failures of the
research papers they grade is lack of critical
judgment. To start with, many students cannot
discern the quality of the sources they find and,
in consequence, make a poor selection. Tey
lack the sophisticated analytical and interpre-
tive skills they would need to see implicit and
explicit relations between the sources or to dis-
tinguish between strong and weak arguments.
Second, students tend to summarize read-
ings instead of reflecting upon them and writ-
ing critical, thoughtful papers. As one of the
professors remarked, it is difficult “to get them
to realize they’re not there to just repeat what
someone else has said, but to internalize and
spit back out in their own words, to provide
their own ‘take’ on it … a personal reaction, not
just paraphrasing.”Trained in high school to
write reports, undergraduates do not know how
to formulate good research questions and work
with the sources in a manner that will produce
interesting and coherent answers. While work-
ing with the research materials, many students
do not understand the imperative of proper
citations and may plagiarize, even if it is com-
pletely unintentional.
Finally, all interviewed faculty complained
about mechanical problems that plague stu-
dents’ writing: “florid, overwrought language,
jumbled and verbose”; “grammar declining over
the years”; spelling mistakes; lack of clarity;
poor organization of the text; inappropriate
style for the discipline or intended audience.
In the faculty’s opinion, bad writing is an acute
problem that turns out to be the main obstacle
to students’ success in research.
Conclusions
The small number of interviews prevented us
from making too many demands on the collected
data, but our study led us to several interest-
ing findings and pointed out areas for further
exploration. The benefits from the interviews
went beyond providing the groundwork for the
Undergraduate Research Project by mapping
the expectations faculty members have of their
students. Most librarians used the interviews as
an extension of their liaison activities and inter-
viewed faculty members in their areas of subject
expertise. The meetings with faculty offered li-
brarians an excellent opportunity for developing
existing relationships or for engaging with faculty
they had not had a chance to work with earlier.
The librarians learned a great deal more about the
classes and assignments they had heard about at
the reference desk. Prior to the interviews, two of
the instructors did not understand what librarians
could do for a class and for individual students.
The interview with the subject librarian opened
up a new avenue for collaboration and, in several
cases, the interviews were followed by the faculty
member requesting greater participation by the
librarian in a course.
Te faculty interviews also provided an op-
portunity for subject or reference librarians to
look more holistically at the process students
6
Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester
go through to complete an assignment and to
gain a better understanding of their common
challenges. In this process, research and writing
are deeply intertwined and cannot be separated
from each other. Good researchers have to be
good writers to present the fruits of their inves-
tigation to the scholarly community effectively.
Terefore, the help we can offer students has to
take into consideration all the elements of suc-
cess: finding information, understanding and
analyzing it, and presenting it in writing.
Librarians can help students in all the steps
along the way, starting with bridging the gap of
understanding by helping the student figure out
“what the professor wants.”Tis requires us to be
proactive in communication with faculty about
their assignments and the educational goals of
the course. It may also necessitate that we aug-
ment our methods of bibliographic instruction,
offering it not only in more traditional “library
sessions” but also in a variety of other fashions.
For example, the interviews encouraged us to ex-
periment with special office hours and reinforced
the value of the library resource guides that we
tailor for individual classes each semester.
1
Last but not least, the faculty interviews
made clear the need for librarians to under-
stand the pedagogy of writing in order to assist
students through the final steps of preparing
a well-crafted research paper. Tis conclusion
has been reinforced by a collaboration with
the University of Rochester College Writing
Center.
2
Te involvement of our librarians in
the College Writing Center programs has been
growing in recent years in such areas as research
instruction for freshmen and upper-level writ-
ing courses, the training of new writing instruc-
tors, and the sharing of research and expertise.
As a result of this initial success, eight sub-
ject librarians undertook formal training as
writing consultants; four now hold regular
weekly tutoring hours in the writing center. Te
writing initiative led to the creation of a spe-
cialized tutoring service in Spanish, built upon
the language skills and abilities of the modern
languages and cultures librarian. Further efforts
to connect research and writing led to hiring an
undergraduate writing fellow to provide assis-
tance at the reference desk and in bibliographic
instruction sessions. In the fall 2007 semester,
the libraries’ political science librarian will
teach her first class as an official freshmen writ-
ing seminar instructor. Tese experiences have
also inspired several of us to conduct research
on library/writing program collaborations (e.g.,
Alvarez 2007; Marshall 2006; Ricker and Ka-
plan 2006).
Our writing center collaboration has been
extremely positive, and the feedback suggests
that the expansion of our expertise into writ-
ing is important, useful, and quite in line with
our educational mission. As one librarian puts
it, “Te excursion into [writing] allows us to
reevaluate our professional practice from a
broader perspective so that we can support our
students and faculty in the most meaningful
way” (Alvarez 2006).
Te faculty interviews, along with the many
other activities associated with the Undergrad-
uate Research Project, have provided us with an
opportunity to look at our professional practice
from a broader perspective and through the
eyes of the students. Tis, in turn, has allowed
us to align our programs and services with stu-
dent needs and work practices and to provide
truly student-centered support for learning.
Notes
1. https://www.library.rochester.edu/index.cfm?page=courses.
2. http://writing.rochester.edu/help/wconsultants.html.
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