2. Students as Learners

Building on Prior Knowledge and Understanding

You play a critical role in drawing out the knowledge practices and conceptual understandings about research that students already possess as they enter your course, helping them transfer their previous knowledge into new contexts, and building on what they’ve already learned. Acknowledging students’ prior knowledge and understanding can help reinforce their identity as a researcher and increase their expectation that they can successfully complete the assignment.

Key factors that can impact students’ prior knowledge and understanding of research and information literacy practices include their:

Previous academic experience

For example, students entering your institution from other school systems that lack exposure to academic resources and experiences due to a lack of school funding, a lack of parental support, or difficult life circumstances, have extra challenges as they try to catch up to those with more recent or robust exposure.

Groups that may be disproportionately negatively affected include first-generation students, students from underprivileged school boards (e.g. northern Indigenous communities, rural communities, racialized communities), and mature students.

Cultural context

For example, students from other cultural contexts may have extra challenges as they try to make sense of how information is organized and valued within another culture. In some cases, they may be unlearning what they had previously learned in order to meet the assignment expectations.

Groups that may be disproportionately negatively affected include International and Indigenous students.

Familiarity with disciplinary and academic language
In particular, students with language barriers are at a significant disadvantage as they must identify effective keywords in academic language and sift through hundreds of results using advanced vocabulary to identify relevant articles and analyze lengthy texts – tasks that can be challenging for students with advanced English language proficiency.

Case Study: Monisha

While her program hasn’t been research intensive, the course readings from her first semester have helped Monisha feel more comfortable with discourse from the field. She also had an opportunity last semester to conduct research in the Essentials of Communication course. Her topic for that project, however, was about parental controls on social media. She quickly realizes that the research required by the Makeup for Media and Creative Arts project is a little different from what she’s used to. She’s not sure what types of sources would be considered authoritative in this case or where they would be found.
Q: How could the instructor help Monisha transfer her previous knowledge about research strategies to this new context?

Case Study: Aydin

Since Aydin is in his first semester, he hasn’t conducted academic research since high school. All he remembers is that he shouldn’t use Wikipedia. While he spends a fair amount of time looking up information on Google or Microsoft’s AI tool, Copilot, the assignment for the Innovation: Shaping the Modern World course explicitly states that use of these tools is not permitted. Instead, he must use library resources only. But after an initial search of the library, he feels lost and confused.
Q: How could the instructor help Aydin build on his existing knowledge about conducting research and apply it to this new context?

Strategies for Success

  • Use class discussions, discussion boards, or small groups to draw out student knowledge about information literacy practices before or during the research project.
  • Provide opportunities for students to share with their peers their approach to the research project, solutions to research problems they encountered, or favourite research tools and resources they discovered.
  • Develop formative activities (or invite a librarian to lead a workshop) so students can practice skills like identifying sources, using library databases, reading academic articles, etc. (See Teaching Troublesome Tasks under chapter 3).

License

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Designing Research Assignments that Enhance Student Research Skills Copyright © 2024 by Kathleen Oakey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.