The comments on the previous post, particularly AcadeMama's mention of annotation and synthesis exercises, have set me thinking again about how complicated these skills are and how they might be best taught. I'm afraid I've been guilty of doing too much talking about some of these skills, then letting students go off on some too-large research project rather than setting up exercises for my students to build these skills more incrementally. In past semesters, before assigning the traditional argumentative research paper, I have used a progression of assignments:
- paragraph summaries of three or four page articles
- a text-wrestling essay (to borrow UMass-Amherst's approach) that summarizes and responds to an article of about a dozen pages or so
- an assignment analyzing the differences in two contradictory articles
but I am thinking now that many more shorter assignments might work better. Here are some of the things I've been trying out and other ideas I've been considering.
- I think my students need lots more practice differentiating between claims, evidence, and analysis. (Newsweek's one-page columns come to mind here as possibilities, or newspaper editorials; the first part of D. Q. McInerny's Being Logical seems as if it might be useful as well, if I'm remembering it accurately.)
- They also need loads of practice with summarizing, paraphrasing, and selecting quotations (a trio I find myself writing on the board over and over again, time better spent in making them do it). Here we run up against (some) students' difficulties with reading, a subject I've written about earlier. I started in with this last week, using for fodder the nonfiction book my students are reading this semester, Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map. I've been doing the selecting myself, of difficult sentences for them to paraphrase and paragraphs to summarize and select quotable quotes; when they get to the point of handling sources more independently, here's a handy guide from the University of Houston that explains when to do which.
- Evaluating sources is another problem area. Some of my colleagues prohibit the use of web sites, insisting students use research databases to try to reduce/avoid this problem; my position is, rather, that the Internet is a rich source of research info that students need to be able to access effectively. But as many times as I try to explain relevance, authority ("who is the author? how do you know he/she is an expert?"), bias, and currency, my students still, over and over again, try to use anonymous sources or commercial sites or (horrors!) even blogs. My idea this semester: Up to this point my students have been using blogs for daily journaling based on a prompt word or picture. I think I'll try giving them a daily subject or question, have them do a quick Internet search, then post a link to the best site/article they can find in 5 or 10 minutes (maybe also posting a comment to evaluate another student's source?).
- Yet another stumbling block is the integration of sources, actually using this information in the service of some larger or different point. (Here's where we get those ragtag patchwork attempts, or the ones with a train of thought so choppy you--or should I say I?--can't read more than a paragraph at a shot.) In trying to teach students how to integrate sources, though, I think my focus is too often misplaced on the mechanical, on using signal phrases and inserting in-text citations rather than on how to discover and make explicit the meaning relationships between bits of information. Often I see students who don't seem to have thought through which piece of evidence supports which claim, which two claims or pieces of evidence contradict each other, or, more generally, how the bits fit into the structure of the whole. Again I find I spend too much time talking them through the process, in the abstract, rather than actually doing it. In the collection of online handouts that accompany his Writing at the Threshold, Larry Weinstein provides a model for a useful sort of exercise: arrange this set of student notecards into the skeleton of a coherent argument. I'd like to have several sets of information like this for students to manipulate. Some sort of mapping or color-coding might be a good thing to try as well.
- Finally, on a more "academic" level, another set of tools with (I think) great potential are the templates in Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's They Say, I Say (the introductory chapter is available as a pdf); I was skeptical of the whole template-idea, but it's pitched at an approachable level that shows students in clear terms some beginning steps they can make to enter into conversation with texts.
Anybody got any other ideas?
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