Thanks for posting!

Karrie and Others: If you haven’t seen Alison Head and Michael Eisenberg’s recent study <a href=”What Today’s College Students Say About Conducting Research in the Digital Age, please take a look. It’s a fascinate study of how students grapple with getting more “context” to understand their assignments.

– Kim Duckett

Extra kudos for putting a CC license on the tutorial.

I once heard someone I admire say that what we think of as “being smart” can also be described as “consistently making good choices.” This fits with my view of multiple intelligences — smart people do the right things with their time, say the right things to others, go about solving problems efficiently, etc. To me, making good choices requires having the right kind of back story, that’s what intelligent intuition comes from.

Another way to think of the back story is that we are helping students develop “systems thinking.”

I never “get it” when people give me a lot of rules — first aid was taught to me that way when I was in highschool and it was a confusing maze. Far more helpful would have been some understanding of physical systems, so that in coping with unique emergencies I would have intelligent intuitions about what to do. A closer-to-home example is observing the way people go about trying to solve IT-related problems when they have no intuition about whether the sort of problem they are looking at is coming from their machine, their local network, or an external website. Usually highly ineffective and frustrating!

Too often I have encountered students who are stumped or blocked because they have been taught tool use instead of the back story. The “get full text” button we use between our indexes and our fulltext subscriptions is a good example. It often does things that students don’t expect, and then they become stumped or confused, because they see it only as tool, and not as part of a system. It sounds to me like the comment above about understanding algorithmic search and “what happens when you hit the search button” is just the sort of thing I am talking about as systems thinking.

Another example I would offer is the way students are often taught to narrow or broaden their search when using article databases, and the justification for doing so is because they got “too much stuff” or “not enough stuff.” When addressing a research question or a problem, the task is to think of the facets or contours of your research question. How does my question fit into the scope of issues in the field? How have people answered my problem or others like it? Are their more than one set of theories involved, with different schools of thought? We need to be teaching students to use our research resources as part of a research process, not just to get more or less stuff.

I think students can become smarter –even without our intervention– once they have the overview of the systems they are using. Systems thinking, or the back story, allows them to usefully reflect on their processes and use their critical thinking skills to formulate strategy. We will never get there only providing students with rules or checklists. Recently I saw a tutorial about evaluating resources that asserted that resources found on an .edu or .gov website were generally reliable. As a former gov docs librarian, I would not have said that. I explained to students about how different branches of the govt were beholden to diff stakeholders — and let them decide how to evaluate and use the annual report from an executive branch agency, in which the agency head works at the pleasure of the President.

Providing the back story feels to me like our best value-add, and I think the authors have hit upon a very practical way to re-tool ourselves in that direction.