Synecdoche

Students Fail to Read Sources Deeply

The Citation Project, a national study of 174 student papers from 16 colleges and universities, is examining how students use sources in their research papers. Here are some highlights of the preliminary findings, released this year:

Students rarely cite material located very far into sources:

46% of all of the citations that students made are to the first page of the source, and 23% are to the second page.

77% of all of the citations are to the first three pages of the source, regardless of whether the source is three pages or more than 400 pages long.

9% of the citations are to Page 8 of a source or beyond.

Sources are misused in one of five citations, and citations almost always draw on very short passages:

Of the 1,911 student uses of sources that the project coded, 4% are copied and cited but not marked as quotations from a source; 42% are copied and marked as quotations; 16% are “patchwritten,” defined as “restating a phrase, clause, or one or more sentences while staying close to the language or syntax of the source”; 32% are paraphrased; and 6% are summarized.

20% of the source uses represent a misuse of materials, with students failing to mark them as quotations or patchwriting.

96% of the source uses show students working with two or fewer sentences from the text rather than engaging with a sustained passage in the source.

More than half of the papers misuse sources:

Of the 174 papers the project reviewed, 19% included at least one instance of copied material that is cited but not marked as a quotation; 91% included at least one instance of copied and cited material marked as a quotation; 52% included at least one instance of patchwriting; 78% included at least one instance of paraphrasing; and 41% included at least one summary.

56% of papers misuse sources by either failing to mark copied words as a quotation or by patchwriting. Of those, 15% did both.

Source: The Citation Project (via The Chronicle)

I suppose we shouldn’t be altogether surprised that students deal so poorly with source material; we were, after all, students once. I clearly remember looking for quotes to “plug in” to papers I had already completed as faux evidence that I had done a modicum of research. It is furthermore true that my students seem to understand what constitutes plagiarism less with each passing year. Nevertheless, I think what is most troubling about these results is that they are symptomatic of a failure to instill in our students the ability and the inclination to engage with broad arguments (that span more than three pages) and critically evaluate the conclusions they draw.¹ If we cannot inspire students in the humanities to think critically about the sources they read and judge strictly the conclusions they contain —in primary and secondary sources alike— there is little to be gained by asking them to read from these sources at all. Our first goal² must be to give our students the tools and the desire they need to engage deeply and analytically when confronted with new information. Once they learn to think rather than parrot, and to approach new conclusions skeptically, as one among many, rather than as dogma handed down, perhaps then we can hope that reading will no longer be a rote exercise in scouring source material for quotes, but a consequence of a thirst for intellectual stimulation and challenging debate; and using quotes correctly and in context not a matter of convenience, but of honoring another’s intellectual labor. Why have we pursued academic careers if not for the challenge and stimulation of thinking our way through puzzling plots, literary or otherwise?

Footnotes

1. I am reminded of the Director of Jihad Watch Robert Spencer’s editorial in the Brown Daily Herald after his campus lecture in 2007. In it he points out that no one had refuted his arguments about the scriptural justification for Islamic violence committed against unbelievers. The audience, he notes, opted instead to vilify his argument (not his evidence) as an incitement to violence against Muslims. I was not in attendance at the lecture, and however poisonous his politics, I am sympathetic to his accusation that students were unwilling to “engage intellectually” with an unwelcome and troubling point of view. ↩
2. After teaching them to write, of course. ↩

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