Editorial: Must prioritize research acumen

Last-minute pressure is one of the most valued resources among Pitt essay writers.

As pressing… Last-minute pressure is one of the most valued resources among Pitt essay writers.

As pressing as term paper deadlines can seem, students often choose to let them fall out of consciousness until the night before or morning of.But as a new study out of Syracuse University reminds us, opening a fresh Microsoft Word document two hours before a 10-page paper is due is not the real problem; it’s that college students are largely ignorant as to why extra time should matter. That is, essay writers don’t assign enough priority to two essential processes: researching topics and integrating that research into their essays. Given the growing importance of evidence-based reasoning in our discourse, a shift in priorities is in order, and the Pitt undergraduate experience should adapt to encourage this.

The Citation Project, a study that analyzed 164 research papers from first-year English composition courses at 15 colleges, strongly suggests that in general, college students don’t know how to properly find sources nor integrate those ideas in writing.

Out of the papers 164 it reviewed, the study found that more than half of citations referred to documents five pages or less in length, and that about 75 percent of citations referred to information that was clearly gleaned from the first three pages of original text. Additionally, the study found that 91 percent of citations took forms that didn’t reflect original composition on the student’s part (i.e., students either copy-and-pasted verbatim, minimally altered copied material or paraphrased a small portion of text).

Classifying one citation as paraphrase and another as original composition carries obvious levels of subjectivity, but for however limited the study’s implications are, the general point still remains — the citizens of the future ought to know how to make sense of primary sources.

In this department, Pitt could and should do a better job.

Don’t get us wrong. In terms of overall research gravitas, the University has made huge strides in recent decades — research spending at Pitt rose from $9,000 per student in 1993 to about $21,000 per student in 2007, according to a study that the Goldwater Institute published last year..

But as bountiful and world-renowned as Pitt’s expanding research might be, that doesn’t mean students are making the most of such research for their papers. We believe that any explosion of new knowledge akin to Pitt’s ought to accompany a proportional explosion of knowledge-synthesis skills. Pitt should do more to ingrain in students not only the importance, but also the practice of evidence-based reasoning.

Our start to a solution: Pitt should open a first-year Seminar in Composition class devoted entirely to the underappreciated art of research papers.

Because, come on, it’s dangerous to assume that the skills of gathering and integrating sources should be left to far-away high school curricula, especially as the nature of information changes almost daily. And because impressing budget-cutting legislators lingers in the minds of many administrators these days, perhaps now is the perfect opportunity to flaunt the quality of Pitt’s educational program.