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Norma Marion Alloway Library

Teaching Research Processes - The 2024 Workshops

A guide to concepts and resources to support three faculty workshops: October 4, 11, 18, 2024

Welcome to the 2024 Workshops

                       

We live in a highly challenging information environment:

  • The World Wide Web and social media have brought us great benefit along with significant bafflement, even outright harm. Our students are awash in a sea of confusing information, much of it a direct challenge to the careful work of scholarship. They are embedded in Google and social media yet lack the skills to search effectively for information, evaluate that information, and enlist it to solve problems.
  • Our students pride themselves on their digital skills, yet seem increasingly unskilled at information handling in an academic setting.
  • We are not getting the level of critical thinking and disciplinary research expertise that we expect our students to deliver, despite the TWU student learning outcomes related to development of cognitive complexity (https://www.twu.ca/about-us/liberal-arts-core/undergraduate-student-learning-outcomes; 
    https://www.twu.ca/about-us/liberal-arts-core/graduate-student-learning-outcomes).
  • Few of we faculty have a plan to introduce our students to the significant research skills they need to function ably in today's world. We leave much of the development of those skills up to the students themselves, something that repeatedly fails to create better researchers. Research skill development is not a remedial task, easily accomplished with practice or with an hour's class visit by a librarian.
  • Generative AI offers students the damaging opportunity to avoid developing skills while still enabling them to deliver to you a product that may not be discernable as created by a bot.
Generative AI has led many professors to reconsider larger out-of-class research projects in favour of lectures and in-class handwritten exams outside of a digital environment. To quote one instructor who did just that, “It’s going to force everybody to the lowest common denominator.” But he refuses, he says, “to waste a whole bunch of time just grading robots” (Beth McMurtrie, "Professors Ask: Are We Just Grading Robots?" Chronicle of Higher Education, June 13, 2024.). What we will be discussing will work even in an analog environment, but we are concerned that avoiding the longer research project may limit skill development.  

Here is a presentation that can help students to find perspective on the ways that over-reliance on AI can rob them of an education (open to full screen and use the navigation arrows at the bottom):

https://prezi.com/view/it5qucCUYXQC67RvuThc/

The university has a policy and a set of guidelines on the use of AI at TWU. Both are PDF downloads. 

 

We believe that we can offer a corrective to the student research ability deficit by focusing more on student research processes and development of research skills through mentored faceted assignments.

This platform for our 2024 workshops provides information, exercises and other details to help you move forward with transforming your assigned research projects into tools to train your students as skilled researchers within your discipline. While the focus is on informational research (rather than experimental or human participant research) this approach is quite easily transferable to those other fields.

[For materials from the previous 2022 workshops, see https://libguides.twu.ca/DevelopingStudentResearchers4Unit]