Student Initiative and the Research Process

Student Initiative and the Research Process by Audrey Conant, MEMA Information Skills Chair

"The information literate student is.... an interested lerner." Loertshcer.

Motivation "is not separated from, but situated in, the tasks and environment."
J. Turner.

David Loertscher lists intrinsic motivation among eight active attributes of the information literacy process. Librarians are responding to this essential when they enhance student motivation through the library programÍs climate and the program's specific tasks.

They are also providing leadership in a solicited role. Classroom teachers have expressed interest in workshops on "motivational strategies." ( This appeared consistently in their in-depth assistance-wanted lists as derived in a National Library Power training session. On a moderate level, they wanted "help to create a positive...emotional learning environment." )*

This chapter views students at the cross-roads of educational change. They are being redirected in their learning in ways they may perceive as an about-face. They may be confused or even resentful of instruction requiring performance, initiative, and accountability. Learning these new responsibilities is difficult. Unlearning reactive behavior and switching to interactive and proactive learning renders it even more difficult. Especially for students who have been satisfied with the results of their past efforts.

Two ways librarians can contribute to a climate conducive to active learning are: protecting student rights and building valid self-confidence. Some examples:

Allow individuals to use the research process as their own, make their own mistakes, helping them tackle these mistakes as learning opportunities, without penalty.
Individualize process assessment through conferencing, journal responses, annotated behavior, mini-portfolios. This overt, personal attention is not lost on students. They feel important because they are singularly being treated so.
Measure a student against past performance and projecting expectations based on that vista...how far have you come in the information literacy process and where can you go from here....the glass is half-full...looking at what you have accomplished, not how far you still have to go... [This does not preclude measuring against exit standards as well, but offers a balance.]
Keep confidences, be non-intrusive, protect privacy [Communicate availability of student work when giving assignments, and extend privacy by limiting accessibility to electronic portfolios.]
Be honest with students in assessment and communication. Don't give undue praise or keep students in the dark. Explain your goals, your whys and the hows. Be upfront. Students have a right to know ahead of time how they will be assessed. They should understand the grading or other assessment components fully.
Incorporate student self-evaluation within learning activities and give it due importance. Have students self-monitor their progress throughout the research process. When what students think of themselves counts, then the students themselves count.
Advocate for students. Speak openly on their behalf. Lobby for longer projects and time to do them well. Request extensions for students creating databases as organizational tools or applying research via time-consuming activities or products.

Motivation

Earlier in this chapter redirection was treated as a challenge to students, as demanding, even intimidating. Other aspects of redirection can be quite positive. The remainder of this chapter describes how educators can instill motivation through a climate of interest, security, and support.

Process. When students achieve mastery over a generic, replicable information problem-solving process, they are no longer dependent upon educators' specific lock-step directives during each research project. Result: independence to direct the flow of one's own unique information needs. Being in the 'driver's seat' with an educator as guide, instead of studying a how-to manual, results in more student interest, more retention, more understanding. See assessment options in INFORMATION LITERACY AS PROCESS chapter.

Being listened to. When teachers and peers listen to a student in order to incorporate his ideas with theirs, he knows his ideas are being taken seriously. Result: incentive to have his ideas live up to how he wants to be perceived.

First Step
Give recognition to students who support or expand another's statement. See fishbowl assessment tool in OBSERVATION chapter.

Technology. Skills of electronic publication, presentation, analysis, and searching result in feeling of control over an incredibly powerful tool. [Obversely, consistent failure to access electronic information due to inadequate preparation results in aimless browsing and distraction, feelings of intimidation, and rejection of technology as a serious information source.] See guide sheets and assessment tools in ELECTRONIC LITERACY chapters.

Social. team, companionable aspects of collaboration.

First Steps

Recognize students for inviting and involving others in a positive manner while presenting or within group research activities. See fishbowl assessment tool in OBSERVATION chapter.

Model collaboration in behavior and attitude by sharing responsibilities with classroom teachers. Which attributes of collaboration would you like to see spread in a ripple effect among students? Then make sure that students can observe these attributes in your actions.

Fourth grade groupings we worked with mined the book Wild Fox for basic facts about red foxes. They planned to expand and use the information in prequels and sequels to the book. Guilford librarian Nancy Grant and I monitored the process. We observed that ALL students stayed on task with enthusiasm for over 45 minutes. We had observed significant individual distraction before we started, and had scheduled about 25 minutes for this activity. This sustained group interest influenced our subsequent planning and carried over to the rest of the lengthy project. We found that clear objectives resulting in frequent tangible results helped maintain sustained effort within groups. So did having specific, functional roles within groups. Different groupings became 'experts' in red fox research in magazines, videos, encyclopedias, non-fiction. Different groupings searched categories of red fox information, such as life style and habits, appearance, history. Still different groupings, each containing a variety of these experts, wrote and illustrated their stories. What group pride when Wild Fox's author, Cherie Mason, sat with each group to discuss its red fox story, and asked group members to autograph their story for her.

Identification with currency, reality, and utility of many curricular projects. When students are able to make, collect, and re-organize information that can be used by others as a source beyond the current project, the result is a feeling of belonging, of contributing, of significance. (For example; surveys, interviews, updates, reorganization of information into maps, graphs and charts.)

Build a level of 'publishable' quality into the assessment of these products. This level might even be above the standard, or proficient level. Include assessment of in-process steps such as verification and citation. Reward this level by providing broader and more enduring access of the product beyond class presentation via online availablity and/or library residence in vertical files and other text locales, databases and other computer formats, tapes and cassettes.

Multi-sensory aspects of active learning; researching, creating, receiving. Students who have leeway regarding learning styles and communication options feel that their needs and decisions count. They also experience more success. (Leeway does not extend to assessment: it is important to have the same quality of assessment tools for all options. Students have at times perceived alternative products, for instance, as easy cop-outs from essays because of relaxed assessment of these products.)

Student participation in class planning, assessing themselves, others, and programs, teaching others, contributing content. Result: feeling that they are part of the education team, not just the object of educators' requirements. When students choose their own topics and begin to develop search plans, they typically bite off much more than they can chew. Safety net: they need tips and experience in choosing and planning and keeping track of numerous short searches. They also need to self-assess those choices and plans, in order to get better at estimating the extent of information needed to fulfill an inquiry, and sensing how their own time usage relates to that need.

Outreach excitement. Students who discover authors and scientists as primary sources, find long-distance peer collaborators at their fingertips, locate unique updating material via the net or a local laboratory, and inform themselves through electronic surveys, feel the wonder and power of outreach.

An Orientation Activity for 'Outreach' Researching

Sometimes a class will select promising group topics for which there are few in-house resources. If the students are unfamiliar with outreach tactics their efforts may backfire and or they may retreat and change topics. A role-play safety net can help. First, lobby for extra time. Then have students play "reporter." (We are presuming students have had some experience in peer teaching and working in groups.) Each group reads a recent newspaper article about which there would be few in-house resources. The group highlights sources referred to in each article, then lists topics and subtopics found in the articles. 'The Gold and Diamond Theft Dept. of the South African Police Service." "Economist Roger Baxter of the Chamber of Mines," "Anglo-American Research Laboratories," "Gold-marketing consultant Dan Pollnow" might be the sources. The group members imagine how they as reporters might have discovered and accessed these sources, in the process developing categories of out-reach access The topics the group might elicit from the articles: current gold theft from mines: history and techniques of gold theft: new ore "fingerprint" database: ore chemistry: prevention and deterrents of gold theft. Key words and search strategies are then discussed and written for the purpose of exploring the topics further. Both sets of lists are then pooled and refined. Each group now splits, its members getting training in different access categories. When the groups reform, each member has become an 'expert' to help access that format of info. For example, each group will now have a phone expert for finding and using 800 numbers as well as for teaching phone etiquette and ethics. They can now become 'reporters' to expand the newspaper article into a magazine article. As a member of a group gets a 'hit', that hit is posted under its category with the finder's name. Other class members may get an idea for searching their subtopic just from the posting, or they may decide to go to the finder and get advice. The final result could be an expanded article from each group or a collated class article. Note: many newspapers are now appending a URL at the end of some articles. The URL may hold citations and verification information, or extended background material. The above exercise could replicate a URL for a news article without one. Or it could create usable URLs for several articles in an upcoming school newspaper publication.

An assessment technique that can be built into this orientation: groups do a how-to for using their information conduit. This how-to not only serves as a test of comprehensive understanding of a specific conduit, but upon improvement following an assessment conference, the how-to can serve as a peer guide.

Open tasks. When students are in charge of focus development, planning, product format, or other, aspects of the research process, they willingly work at skills they only reluctantly address during tasks with limited choices. Extrapolating from "Organize to Motivate" by Diane Truscott in the NERA Journal v 32 (2) 1996, the most motivating literacy activities are "open" tasks, involving substantive choices and freedoms. They result in:

voluntary use of goal-oriented strategies
voluntary use of problem-solving strategies
persistence, increased concentration, expectation of success
increased willingness to choose a challenging task

An example of a problem-solving tool available for voluntary use follows. The checklist serves as a set of self-help prompts, as a safety net. The ostensible use is as a 'ticket' or coupon. A column with three checks in it (or four), indicating student manipulations during a keyword search, 'admits' or earns the student help from a librarian. The ticket then serves as an aid to student verbalization of the keyword problem. Completed charts (used for five searches) show an educator consistently omitted strategies and potential individual and group mini-lesson needs, thus also serving as assessment tool.

Student control of a task's direction and progress is another high motivator. It tacilitates internal control as well as acknowledgment of individual accountability for outcomes. The 'status of the class' activity, described in the CONFERENCING chapter, is a short, public verbal commitment of student choice, listed by the librarian. A variation: students write their day's research objectives in reasonable detail before beginning. This constitutes an informal choice, commitment, plan. [This works best when students have participated in decisions about the larger project, imparting a sense of value and pleasure.] Student freedom is balanced by the public or written commitment. Midpoint of such a project, each student could review her collected objectives and reflect upon estimation, timing, sequence within the research process, and strategies. Small group conferences with an educator could then explore over-reaching or under-reaching when planning, and ways to deal with this during the remainder of the project.

Discrete, appropriate responsibilities that fit decisions in this way prevent runaway student choices that get out of hand or beyond the educator's framework.

Students in-charge, venturing into learning, may feel more vulnerable than students who are following the piper. They need to know that safety nets exist under the continuum of the research process. For instance, learners may feel super-responsible when creating new information, especially if this information will become a resource for others as well as themselves. Librarians therefore need to be super-sensitive to these students' realization that they must become qualified information makers and collectors. When librarians respond to seekers of expertise, feelings of inadequacy are replaced with pride of ownership and control. Librarians can join with classroom teachers to create interview and survey learning centers to serve as introductions to and preliminary experience with questioning skills. They can help by providing or preparing assessment criteria with students for these skills as well as for databases, cataloging skills [for specimens, fingerprints, whatever], or media recording skills. These criteria can serve as guides as well as measurements. See SELF-ASSESSMENT chapter for survey criteria chart.

REFERENCES Loertshcer, David. "President's column" in School Library Media Quarterly. Summer, 1996. p. 192.

Turner, Julianne. "The influence of classroom contexts on your children's motivation for literacy." Reading Research Quarterly.

Turner, Phillip M. "What help do teachers want, and what will they do to get it?" School Library Media Quarterly, Summer, 1996. pp. 208-212.

August 1997
Maine Educational Media Associaton

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