Teaching the Process of Writing Research Reports

by John R. Walkup, Ph.D.

The research report is a time-honored tradition at the university level, with most assigned for no other reason to satisfy university writing requirements or appease the Ghosts of Professors Past. Even K-12 schools have gotten into the act, especially at the high school level.

More than any activity, research reports generate a false sense of rigor. Most consume huge chunks of students' time, yet offer little in the way of actual learning.

Even worse, they often arise from a misguided understanding of the time needed to correct them, so we end up with piles of essays for which we cannot provide adequate feedback. The research report thus becomes a chore to both students and teachers alike.

So why do we assign research reports? I think the answer is that the research report encapsulates, in a single assignment, a complete suite of academic skills we expects students to learn.

Unfortunately, that doesn't mean students will learn these skills by simply writing the research report, no matter the quality of the scoring rubric. Assessing students' completed work through the use of a rubric in hopes that they will learn each component of the rubric is what I call "guardrail teaching," where we hope that students learn by being corrected rather than being taught. (Guardrail teaching is a subject of a future blog post.)

The skills needed to write a well-developed research report are myriad. We cannot expect every student to know these skills. In fact, most of us will say that our classrooms are filled with students who lack many of the skills needed to write a quality research report.

I think we should teach each skill in a separate lesson, where we isolate the skill for treatment. Using an analogy, to learn from a scientific experiment we vary the value of a single variable while fixing the values of all other variables. The same applies to teaching an activity involving multiple skills (which it invariably does).

Let us examine a few of the skills needed to write research reports. Although somewhat counter-intuitive, I think it is best to avoid hot topics when teaching these skills, especially if they carry much socio-political baggage a topic. If we choose the Ferguson riots as our topic at hand, students will struggle to focus on what they really need to learn from the assignment.

The approach described below will allow students to deepen their understanding of each step in the report-writing process. It will also lighten grading loads, an important consideration in light of the heavy time demands of K-12 instruction.

Researching

One of the first steps in the writing process is researching. Often, we expect students to pop open Google and enter key words, find a few juicy items and hit the print button.

However, researching requires a strategy. Before searching, students should brainstorm on where they will likely find good information and how they will go about extracting that information. While the Internet will pose as the most prominent source, could students also find information in the local library? Could they email experts? Could they find useful Twitter hashtags?

If we want to teach students to research, then we should avoid having them focus on properly citing their sources or organizing the information into paragraph form, at least for this lesson. After all, if the lesson centers on researching, then the process of researching rises to the forefront.

We can assess student learning for this lesson by having students fill out tables where they indicate the source of the information, its salient features (e.g., title, author, date), whether it is a primary or secondary source, and the overall quality of the information, among other things.

By targeting these skills for grading, students will be compelled to pay closer attention to the quality of the information they gather for their future research projects. Even better, we will not need to ascribe such directions as "Choose at least one book and one journal article."

Questions we can ask students upon completion of their researching tasks could include:

1. Create your own step-by-step guide for others to use when researching a topic.
2. List the strengths and weaknesses of each source of information (such as Twitter, Google) using examples from your own research activity.

Citing

We next consider the lesson on how to properly cite materials. Again, it behooves us to isolate this skill from all other skills, such as the ability to research. Therefore, the most efficient way to teach students to select ideas from other resources and cite their sources properly is to provide the resources for them.

For example, a teacher could hand out an assortment of resources (e.g., books, white papers, journal articles), with all of the articles addressing the same topic (say, water conservation).* Students could then pore through the articles and, using a highlighter, note which passages are relevant to the topic at hand.

Asking them to find their own resources mixes a subskill (researching) into the assignment, potentially masking students' true proficiency in citing sources. By giving students the resources, the teacher controls for that variable and can focus on the lesson at hand (citing).

Rather than cast the citations into a style format, such as APA, I suggest having students fill the entries in the MS Word bibliography tool. Whether or not the title is italicized is of less concern; the bibliography tool can handle that issue.

We could ask students a number of questions upon successful completion of this activity.

1. Create your own citation style, but indicate the reasoning behind your decision-making. (E.g., if posting the year first, why?)
2. Why is one style better than another for a given subject?
3. When is it best to paraphrase and when is it best to directly quote an author?
4. Create a point/counter-point script for why proper citation is important or not so important.

Organizing

Once students have highlighted content they want to include in their report, they must organize it.

When learning to write research reports, students must use a graphic organizer. Such a tool allows students to divert attention away from other skills and focus purely on how they plan to arrange the content in a logical fashion.*

Furthermore, graphic organizers compel students to address missing elements in the information they have assembled.

Perhaps most importantly, graphic organizers allow us to peer into the process of writing by pushing aside such low-level subskills as spelling, punctuation, and style. After all, an editor can fix grammar, but she has no choice but to reject poorly structured manuscripts.

When providing feedback, we should analyze the manner in which students completed the graphic organizer, focusing on whether the contents of each cell truly matches its structure.

Asking students to explain their thought processes as they filled out the graphic organizer is also a good assessment strategy and provides remarkable insight into the barriers students face in their essay development.

Summary

Students can't learn that which they have not been taught. Only once students learn to research, cite sources, and organize their information should they be required to undertake projects that involve all of these skills.


* By the way, I use graphic organizers in my own professional grant-writing career in the form of logic models. They help me organize my content in much the same fashion.

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Seeking training at your school or district centered on Cognitive Rigor or Depth of Knowledge?  Call me at (559) 903-4014 or email me at jwalkup@standardsco.com. 

We will discuss ways in which I can help boost student engagement and deep thinking in your classrooms. I offer workshops, follow-up classroom observation/coaching, and curriculum analysis to anywhere in the country (and even internationally).