On How to Pick: Model research behavior

In a 21st century world where just about any data is available at your fingertips at any time, memorizing information is a skill that few people need any more. I’m not one of those faculty who bemoans the loss of memorization skills (though I can still remember many of the Latin conjugation forms I learned in high school, and would still admire anyone who can recite a section of any length of the Iliad or the Odyssey from memory).

I prefer to tackle today’s world. What do students need to know how to do today? Find the right information, and evaluate it.

Students entering college consistently rate their own search skills as good or very good (more than 80% of students say this). But in fact, they are drowning in information, both for their general life and for academic research. Project Information Literacy from the University of Washington has some great reports on how students feel more overwhelmed by today’s surfeit of information than ever.

Faculty who teach undergraduate classes have told me that they don’t really think of themselves as modeling research behaviors for their students. I encourage all faculty to think of themselves as modeling research behaviors for their students, because that’s what students need to see modeled. “Covering” information (this is fast becoming one of my least favorite phrases) isn’t what’s critical for today’s students; orienting them to the information available and demonstrating how to choose what’s good information and what’s not is critical.

First and foremost, we need to show them how to bootstrap themselves into a place where they understand what they’re looking at. When discussing student-led learning at one of the medical schools we used as a model for our new program, at Case Western, we heard that student facilitators who taught incoming first-year students taught them a series of bootstrapping techniques that faculty had never thought to cover.

Never heard of gout before? Look it up in a dictionary or Wikipedia. Learn the basic definitions, then branch out from there. (Now that you know it’s a disorder caused by the buildup of uric acid, look in your textbooks for a basic description of kidney function and see if you can figure out how that buildup is caused.) Then you increasingly grow more specialized in your reading until you feel you understand at least the basics.

This is how a lot of us tackle new topics. But we often do it so unthinkingly that we