Burke's Parlor | Research as Conversation, & Quoting as Giving Credit

What's the big deal about quoting? And why do students struggle with it?

Past Research? Future Research?

Throughout my education I've been tasked with creating a research-based project a handful of times, the final product usually taking the form of an essay. If we make the definition of "research project" a little more broad, then a lot of what I made during my time broadcasting would be included. In preparing and gathering content for one of the shows I made I ended up doing research on whatever the topic was. Most of the time was definitely spent gathering audio clips though.

Here's a clip of an episode with the station ID removed.

Ooh, ahh! Very Multimodal!

Taking notes

I like to use the smallest suite of apps possible, so I plan on using Google Docs to organize my notes.

Fister's Article.

I was happy to read author and librarian Barbra Fister's article, "Burke's Parlor Tricks: Introducing Research as Conversation." In her Inside Higher ED opinion piece, she details how the seemingly beneficial abundance of scholarly information available to modern students can actually be harmful. With thousands of esoteric and indecipherable references to choose from, how is an undergraduate supposed to parse all that's available to them? Fister argues that this has created an epidemic of low-quality undergraduate research work. For example "nearly half the time the quotes [undergraduates] use are from the first page of the source," Fister notes. (Fister, 2011) I have definitely been a part of that 50% many times during my academic career.

My Thoughts.

Personally, I think that Fister is being way to charitable in her analysis. I'm skeptical of the theory that a large majority of students are itching to do involved research for their essays and are only thwarted by the difficulty of finding and interpreting a good set of sources.

My "differential diagnosis" is this: students are simply acting rationally given the incentive structure they're presented with. Students are masters of navigating the school system. They've been practicing their entire lives.

In a system where numbers are the only thing that matters, student's learn that their time is a form of currency to be exchanged for a grade. They are paying for a grade with their time, and who wants to overpay for something?

Like in any other transaction, one wants to maximize return and minimize cost. Why spend two hours reading, re-reading, and interpreting a complicated source in order to fully understand it when you can spend fifteen minutes pulling a quote from the abstract when the former will only result in marginal returns on your letter grade? In other words, why invest $95 dollars for a $95 dollar return when you can invest $75 for a $90 dollar return?

The system is set up in such a way as to make quoting the abstract the most logical course of action in the same way that a completely free market makes your landlord painting over the mold on the windowsill the most logical course of action. You still rented the apartment. Maybe for a little less per month than they could have gotten, but you still send them a big check every month. Why would they do any more?

If we keep our system the way it is, students will keep painting over mold because, according to the grade book, people are still renting from them.