Tuesday, April 5, 2011
The Research paper - a hate, hate relationship
The Junior research paper. It takes six weeks to teach, two weeks to grade, and one day to piss off 80 students who don't understand that four pages doesn't mean...3 pages and two lines on a fourth page. There's got to be an easier way, right? I know there's merit in teaching the skills of analysis and synthesis, the skill to find sources that are credible, create a thesis, support it with research in a coherent form. Yes, these are skills that my college bound students will definately need. I had to write a research paper in every humanities and science class I took at the university. However, how do I get them to pay attention to detail enough to write a good research paper. I know that I wrote a research paper in high school. I know they're not much FUN, but seriously, I think it can be done. Thus, I vow to begin again the search for a good way to teach the argumentative research paper that creates authentic voice, but includes researched and cited support. If you have any ideas, I'm open to them.
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Bah. It didn't let me post before. Maybe now?
ReplyDeleteI have my honors freshmen start the year with an ethics unit/research paper*. They (in pairs) choose a topic relating to ethics in some way and then create a guiding question (they have to write a focused yes/no question) and each choose a side to research/write about. The yes/no question helps oodles in getting decent thesis statements out of them. The pairing helps them find better sources, since they always work together even though it's a competition of sorts (they have to put their essays and at least three visuals on a poster (names redacted) which goes to the honors sophomores for scoring - prizes to the winners!).
Grading them still sucks - the topics never vary that much year to year...although I did get two firsts this year: public nudity and prostitution (both with cautions to be veddy veddy careful in choosing visuals!) which spiced things up a bit. Also, no matter how many times we practice in class, when it comes to the actual paper, a solid 70% of students forget how to use parenthetical citations. Add to that there are always a couple of papers that - based purely on the rubric's wording - would get grades not equitable with the actual writing. I hate the grading process. Hate.
Anyway, that's what I do, FWIW. I get some papers that are short or don't have any argument or don't have any research, but for the most part, they do a decent job.
*Work done by honors freshmen at the beginning of the year doesn't exactly provide a typical experience, I know.