That’s a great point about choosing a research topic, too, Kyri. My gut wants to believe that students may be more interested in a topic of their choosing. But I also see that it can be very hard for them to narrow down to an appropriate topic when they’re given the universe to choose from.

One of the pitfalls I’ve found is that students are too locked in to a research topic before they come in. They haven’t done any preliminary reading and don’t know if their chosen topic is well-represented in the library collection or if it is even a valid or meaningful research question. With our students, who are community college students, I would prefer to see faculty assign specific topics/questions rather than letting the students flounder around trying to choose one.

But I’m growing more and more convinced that beginners are going through the ropes because they’re in boot camp and they have to do something that has no purpose other than to prepare them to do something meaningful later. In most institutions, their drill sergeants are often adjunct faculty and TAs who have (unfortunately) low status and are seen as providing a service to the institution by getting students ready to do academic work. The work they do in the class is not, itself, valued except as practice for the real thing, which in actual practice often looks very different. Richard Larson’s classic essay on the topic remains valuable a quarter of a century after it was published.

Students seem so much more ready to be interested and engaged when they are working in their majors and have some contextual knowledge and a purpose in mind – when they’re doing more meaningful research, not just learning how to write a generic research paper. While being able to “reach” every student through a generic writing course seems important and takes up much of librarians’ energies, I sometimes think we could actually reach students more successfully in upper division courses.