Research Papers: now and then

Remember doing research papers for History or term papers for English in high school? The library trips to find book sources and academic articles. The late nights and early mornings finishing up tiny edits and awkward phrasing. OK so the work was awful and full of plagiarized content, the quotes didn’t fit the main point and you created sources out of thin air. good times…

Most of those papers needed a minimum of quotes per page or some other similar requirement--bad idea for kids who only do the minimum.

The problem this creates goes something like this: toss together a collage of words, shoehorn a quote from Abe Lincoln somewhere in the middle and presto! Clean up the bibliography page but don’t worry too much about the format, like the teacher is actually going to check the sources. Turn in the painstakingly edited final draft (don’t laugh).

I don’t have a much better idea for research, but how about this? Give them something random to read and force them to take notes for doing an essay later. Ensure that they can’t find a Sparknotes copy by selecting a narrowly focused topic. Something like ‘crop rotation techniques of Filipino farmers’ or ‘federal regulations of home water softeners’.

This is something colleges get that high schools don’t. Want to really find out if kids can  summarize an idea? Make them write about it.

ACT, SAT and most standardized tests have some form of read and quiz portion because it goes straight to retention. Term papers are more about formatting and researching. Go ahead and argue for space time travel as a legitimate source of federal funding, we really only care that you know how to look up the details and notate them.

I wonder how important it will be in 10 years, researching in the way people do now. In a my lifetime, which isn’t that long, library research for students has come from physical card catalogs to internal databases to external databases like Wilson select plus and LexisNexis. Google has a massive academic search engine for scholarly articles eliminating (almost) the need for separate systems.

The library in just a few short years has become a museum for how we used to do research--also a place for homeless patrons to wash up and change clothes. So you know…not for nothing.

I am little sad about the loss. Insight gained through trial and error shouldn’t disappear so quickly. It took years to get comfortable finding books, scanning chapters, making note cards, changing topics and starting over. It was meaningful work, not exactly digging wells in the Sahara but it set me apart. There aren’t too many ways to stand out in college and be recognized as being better than others at regular academic pursuits.

It wasn’t genius it was skill, the kind you earn.

I’m an optimist on education and the democratizing it has undergone. The internet has leveled the field by removing a lot of the barriers to education, money, time and licensing requirements. I really mean education as the ‘practice of learning stuff’ and not the institutions we spent years in as kids. Even with the massive academic data available at a click, compiling an original paper is fundamentally the same.

So what does the term paper for high school kids look like in 30 years? Since research has changed so much I can’t see teachers asking for a bibliography page with multiple book sources. They should probably need to insert quotes correctly and know how to hyperlink, but the essence of research is in finding the thing, searching for the holy grail of supporting material. I suppose this is still feasible in the same way. The time it takes to put together a good essay with a coherent point is probably about the same as always.

As long as it takes the teacher to remind you that it’s due tomorrow.