A richer semester ~ with Dave Rahbari ~
Helping Students Overcome Research Phobia
You’ve managed to get your students to go to the library, and some of them even took out some books for their research papers. Great! However, now the prospect of somehow finding time to read all those books may at first seem daunting to the student. What can you do to help? Books don’t have search functions! How can you quickly “sift” through a book without giving up a day doing so?
I’ve found that my students appreciated a quick and simple lecture on how to read books for research. This is the polar opposite of curling up with a novel. I told them to begin at the back, in the index. If the book lacks an index, the table of contents has to do. I told them to go through the index and write down all the topics that relate to their research paper and the page numbers on which these topics are dealt with. It helps some students to think of these index topics as ‘tags’ or ‘search terms’ from their experience with online research.
I advised them to leave plenty of space between each topic entry, because the next thing to do is to quickly look through the relevant pages and take very simple notes. It works best to read only the first line of each paragraph. As we’ve taught our students when they write their own paragraphs and then decide which order to arrange them in their final drafts, these first sentences should indicate the main idea of the paragraph. If the topic they are researching does not figure in that first sentence, it probably is not covered in great depth. However, I tell them to not cross that page number out yet. Should the book prove useful and make it past this “rapid recon” stage, where some potential source books will be weeded out, it might be helpful to go back and read even those paragraphs where the student’s topic of choice is only referred to in a tangential manner. Logically it follows that such a paragraph may chiefly concern a topic that throws light on the student’s primary topic, perhaps from an angle not immediately evident.
After each relevant topic in the index has been “sifted” using this technique of reading only first sentences and taking notes, it will be evident whether a book will be one of the student’s primary sources, a sparser but still useful source, or a dead end. Dead end books are promptly returned to the library. The student is left with fewer books to read. Best of all they now have an idea as to which books they need to budget most of their reading time for.
The next step is to go back to a book that looked promising and quickly read the paragraphs you’ve taken notes on, perhaps adding to those notes in the process. At this point I remind the students to never write in a library book, not even with a pencil. If a chapter contains a quantity of “gold mine” paragraphs it should then be read more thoroughly. Read each paragraph all the way through, and write a short sentence in your notes about what it contains that you feel furthers your research aims. After reading that chapter, go back to the index and see if any topics you didn’t at first see as helpful suddenly look more useful now that you’ve read and briefly thought about that chapter.
Some books will yield only enough relevant material to merit a half hour of study, but some will end up being the ones you read for hours. The important thing is for the student to see that even though you can’t search books with a “find” drop down menu, they are still navigable reservoirs of data that can become more accessible than they might at first appear to a researcher who has grown up using the internet.
Dave Rahbari
Part-Time Faculty
English Department
Washtenaw Community College