Research Tango — Guiding Students’ Choices

We have learned that students are more engaged when they have the ability to make choices, but in this post I want to explore the difficulties of guiding students towards making those choices.

I have been working with students for the past two weeks doing the brain calisthenics of exploring interests; considering angles; navigating and evaluating multiple resources; and developing an organizational strategy to work from. Five classes of tenth grade students started their research projects last week, a process that will culminate in each student writing a five page persuasive essay on a (controversial) topic of their choice. It is an all-consuming process to work with these students, but I honestly love doing it. This is my seventeenth year of working with 10th grade students and their teachers and the research process has seen many iterations. The current trend has (thankfully) incorporated student interests and student choice in many facets of the process. Students are more engaged when they have the ability to make choices.

It can be daunting to select a topic when it is totally up to the student. Students are limited by their 15–16 years of experience and their worldly exposure, which may explain why teachers in the past pre-selected a list of topics and walked students through a step-by-step research process. The topics this year include (drum roll…): ISIS, the heroin epidemic, the ethics of zoos, homelessness, human trafficking in the U.S., the impact of global warming on the arctic, the impact of global warming on coral reefs, deforestation in the Amazon, the relationship between drugs and crime, marijuana as a gateway drug, the effectiveness of maximum security prisons, segregation in Milwaukee, the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, and many others.

I work with the classroom teacher to try to help students to focus on a topic that is narrow enough for this research paper (among other skills and tasks). A few of them tell me that they need a broad array of topics to be able to fill up five whole pages. I frequently encounter a sideways glance of disbelief when I tell them that a narrower focus will help them write a better paper. Less is more. It is a hard sell, one that is not always successful.

Today, one student told me that he was focusing on the topic of how prisoners are treated in different types of prisons: light security, medium security, and maximum security. Knowing that he would need to take a position of some sort, I asked him where the controversy was in his topic. He seemed perplexed and said he would compare the different types of freedoms at the different types of prisons. I pressed again and suggested examples such as “maximum security prisons are expensive and unnecessary” or “maximum security prisons are necessary for high risk inmates.” He responded that he thinks that maximum security prisons are necessary, but that he did not think he had enough material for a five page paper with just that topic. He also told me that he would not know who to interview as one of the requirements for the paper is an interview with someone knowledgeable about the topic. He knew someone he could talk to who worked at a low security prison. I then made several other suggestions of narrower topics related to prisons and told him emphatically that it would be much easier to write a paper on a focused topic, adding “what interests you most?” I was able to find out that he thinks that minimum security prisons could be a danger to society if they did not adequately monitor and restrain potential terrorists. Clearly, this student already had a plan for what he would research and write about before he even started reading the first source on the topic. I could not convince him to veer from his course and in the end he told me that he just did not want “to do that much work.”

I understand what he is saying, though I do not agree with it. His concern is to fill up five pages with information about different types of prisons. He has a plan and that is what he is going to do. This young man does not think about research as a way to question his preconceptions on a given topic, or even to lay out an argument on a topic. He wants to be able to meet the requirements of the assignment.

What can I do to guide this student just a little bit further down the path to authentic questioning and searching? I honestly do not know. I tried questioning. I tried a logical argument. I tried listening to his point of view and presenting questions that would (in my view) be easier to write about. He was not moved. It was a bit like a tug of war that I knew I would not win. Am I being inflexible in expecting more?

Don’t get me wrong — this is one student. There are many others who are inquisitive and interested in exploring options and thinking about ways to narrow down a topic to something manageable and interesting to them. They welcome ideas and love expanding their horizons with different resources.

Example:

Librarian: “What is your topic?”

Student: “Drugs”

L: “Is there a specific type of drug or aspect to drug use that you are interested in focusing on?”

S: “Marijuana?”

L: “What about marijuana interests you?”

S: “Marijuana use.”

L: “Would you like some ideas to narrow down this topic?”

S: shrug

L: “There are a number of aspects of marijuana use that you could research. For example, some people think that marijuana is a gateway drug to harder drug use. Others argue that many people smoke marijuana and never end up using harder drugs. You could also look at ways of monitoring levels of marijuana levels like they do with alcohol levels in terms of safe levels for driving. This is a concern in states that have legalized the recreational use of marijuana. Is there a way to monitor safe levels of THC for driving? Another topic that you could research is the effect of marijuana on the developing brain. There is research that says that the human brain is not fully developed until the mid-20s.”

S: “I think that I am most interested in looking at whether marijuana is a gateway drug to harder drugs.”

L: “Let’s look at some of the resources in the databases on that topic.”

Still, I do think about what we could do differently for students who are at a different developmental stage of their inquiry process. We would design the research process differently for the first time student researcher. He would need to practice writing about a narrow topic using evidence from several reliable sources without worrying about page numbers or other such requirements. There would be plenty of modeling and positive reinforcement for taking a position based on evidence and laying out an argument in a logical manner. He might not have the patience for all of these well-intended strategies, but he could be much more prepared on his way out the door in 12th grade.