James C. McDonald

There is a long tradition of complaint about the required research paper in the freshman composition course that dates back almost as far as the assignment itself, as Robert W. Frederick 1929 survey of educators indicates. Articles questioning the value of the freshman research paper, such as Paul F. Fletcher "Should Term Papers Be Abolished?" John W. Stevenson "The Illusion of Research," Thomas E. Taylor "Let's Get Rid of Research Papers," and Richard Larson's "The 'Research Paper' in the Writing Course: A Non-Form of Writing," go back as far as Roy C. Woods "The Term Paper: Its Values and Dangers" in 1933. A few choice words of condemnation or ridicule are almost expected in any article or book that discusses the freshman research paper. Describing students that he observed working on research papers in the library, Michael Kleine laments, "Not only were they not writing, but they were not reading: I detected no searching, analyzing, evaluating, synthesizing, selecting, rejecting, etc. No time for such reading in the heated bursts of copying that interrupted the conversations" (151). The research paper "trivializes the process of knowledge acquisition," Sharon Crowley writes, "Any subject whatsoever can be read up on and mastered for the occasion" ( Methodical163-64). To Ken Macrorie, student research papers are "inane productions" (xi), "bad jokes" (161), "the most unoriginal writings the world has ever seen" (54), and "an exercise in badly done bibliography, often an introduction to the art of plagiarism, and a triumph of meaninglessness--for both writer and reader" (xi).

Yet the research paper remains the 400-pound gorilla of the first-year composition course, probably the most institutionalized undergraduate writing assignment in higher education. James E. Ford and Dennis R. Perry, in their 1982 survey of first-year writing programs, found that 78.11 percent required the research paper (827), only slightly fewer than the 81 percent Ambrose Manning reported in 1961. Some freshman programs, as well as a number of high schools, devote an entire course to research paper instruction. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the percentage may have decreased since 1982, particularly after that year's publication of Larson "The 'Research Paper' in the Writing Course: A Non-Form of Writing," but it's difficult to find evidence of a major change in composition textbooks, which continue to devote more space to this assignment than to any other. Teachers spend far more classtime on this one assignment than on any other (over one-third of the average course, according to Ford and Perry [828]), and the time they spend responding to and grading bibliographies, notes, outlines, drafts, and revisions, as well as dealing with suspected plagiarism, is a legendary burden for teachers. This assignment also burdens others on campus. Writing program directors probably deal with more plagiarism cases involving this one assignment than with all other assignments combined. And Ford and Perry documented the amount of work librarians put into supporting the freshman research paper: 87 percent of college libraries in 1982 organized tours of the library specifically for students learning to write the research paper, 66 percent arranged for librarians to meet with freshman composition classes to lecture them about research methods and materials, and over 50 percent of the schools gave faculty and/or librarians special training on how to instruct and support undergraduates writing a research paper (829).

And despite a myriad of articles on reforming research paper instruction (see Ford, Rees, and Ward "Research Paper Instruction: Comprehensive Bibliography of Periodical Sources, 1923-1980," as well as Ford 1995 Teaching the Research Paper), students are usually taught to follow a composing process not much different from the one James M. Chalfant recommended in 1930, in the first article that English Journal published on the research paper: choose a subject and narrow it, compile a bibliography, take notes, write an outline, and finally compose the theme paying close attention to the conventions for documenting quotations and paraphrases to avoid plagiarism. Later textbooks added the step of revising the draft, and now most textbooks discuss keeping a research journal as an alternative to note cards, but the process for composing a research paper as it has appeared in composition textbooks has changed remarkably little in seventy years, especially given the long-standing, widespread dissatisfaction with the assignment.

This mechanical process of writing a research paper is a legacy of current-traditional textbooks, which dominated composition instruction as the research paper became a requirement in the freshman English course. From a current-traditional standpoint, neither reading nonliterary texts nor writing about them should be a problem because the language in these texts is merely a conduit for transferring thoughts from speaker to hearer. Writing is a simple matter of translating thoughts into words and reading a matter of translating the words back into thoughts. If the writer has written clearly, transmission to a reader should be automatic. Reading instruction for the research paper, therefore, has been confined to some instruction in extensive reading practices required in much research, how to skim and scan many texts for information, but has ignored the need for intensive reading strategies to analyze and evaluate sources. In the first edition of the Harbrace College Handbook John Hodges gave students this advice for reading and using sources:

Seldom will a whole book, or even a whole article, be of use as subject matter for any given research paper. To find what the student needs for his particular paper he must turn to many books and articles, rejecting most of them altogether and using from others a section here and there. He cannot take time to read each book carefully. He must use the table of contents and the index, and he must learn to scan the pages rapidly until he finds the passages he needs. (370)

Hodges assumed that reading is merely a matter of recognizing words and the ideas they represent and that knowledge is a commodity that one possesses; careful reading unnecessarily slows and distracts the student trying to complete a research paper in a few weeks. The assumption that knowledge is a commodity, of course, explains the current-traditional obsession with plagiarism and acknowledging proper ownership of ideas. If one can possess knowledge, one can steal it (or kidnap it, as the Latin origin of the word "plagiarism" suggest). With proper documentation, however, the writer merely "borrows" another's knowledge. Books and articles here are merely containers of bits of knowledge and data that can be labeled, located by indexes, and recorded on four-by-six-inch note cards--only one item per card, please. At best, language is a see-through cellophane wrapper that allows readers to view knowledge inside the containers. Hodges's advice suggested that students use indexes much as shoppers use signs and directions in a giant mall to guide their searches to the right stores and aisles for items they are searching for. The long history of complaints about the assignment from both teachers and students and the success of a black market of student research papers, however, testify to the difficult of learning research writing and the inadequacy of research paper instruction.

The remarkable endurance of the freshman research paper despite the long history of complaints about the assignment may suggest that the problems with the assignment cannot be separated from problems of the required first-year composition course, which has survived even longer despite its own lengthy history of discontent. The problems and debates generally reflect conflicts between the research and teaching missions of the university that go to the heart of the service function of the course and a failure to define clearly the content and purposes of the first-year course, especially regarding research writing.

The undergraduate research paper developed out of the shifting priorities of the modern research university, as the research mission of the university came to influence the education faculty desired for their students. Nineteenth-century American colleges were small colleges whose main function was to instruct an elite student body in the traditional liberal arts preparing for leadership roles in society in a small assortment of professions, medicine, law, and religious ministry. Faculty took it as their responsibility to conserve the wisdom of the ages and transmit it to the next generation. After the Civil War, the modern university began to develop into large knowledge-producing institutions with an important role in the economy of the information age, and faculty took on the new responsibility of teaching and credentialing an ever-growing and ever more diverse student population for an increasing number of professional careers. In contrast to the nineteenth-century college library, which was typically smaller than the local public library, the modern research university library underwent a vast expansion and fostered the development and publication of a growing number of readers' guides, indexes, and bibliographies.

Students needed instruction in navigating these large and complicated libraries, and because freshman English was the only universally required course in the curriculum, it likely seemed the natural place for this instruction. By 1920 composition textbooks were including a chapter on the library, and universities such as the University of Chicago began to require a research paper in the freshman English course shortly after World War I. The requirement was an established part of the freshman English course by World War II. By the time the general education movement led universities to develop other universally required courses that could have covered library instruction, that instruction had been established as the responsibility of the freshman English course, and the research paper assignment had become the core of this instruction.

Whether or not this instruction should be the responsibility of the first-year English course, it would be difficult to argue against teaching student writers how to conduct library research. But whether college freshmen (and high school students) should be taught to write the academic article is much more debatable. Writers need to conduct research for many situations, but few students write academic articles after they graduate--not that there are no benefits to undergraduates who learn to write an academic article. I have yet to find evidence, however, that composition faculty considered alternatives for incorporating library research into freshman English when the research paper became a standard requirement in the course. The main reason that the research paper became the dominant genre of research writing in the first-year course is the service nature of freshman English.

In his history of writing across the curriculum, David R. Russell discusses an unresolved tension in the university's research ideal between its "elitist tendency . . . to promote disciplinary excellence" and its "egalitarian strain . . . that insisted that all students should have some experience in individual research on an important and interesting subject" (86). As it became the dominant production center of knowledge in society, the research university abandoned the oral declamation, a public oration on a political or moral issue important to the general public, and replaced it with the research paper as the dominant genre of extended student discourse, "a comprehensive display of learning on a narrow topic" that addressed experts on "questions of interest to a discipline rather than to the general public" ( Russell79, 81). "Student writing increasingly became research writing," Russell writes, "an imitation of the writing that the institution valued most: the documented or 'research' paper and, to a lesser extent, the laboratory or experimental report" (72; see also Berlin70). This change involved a shift "from student-as-public-performer to student-as-disciple or apprentice, conducting individual research under the guidance of a professor and producing critical, 'original' interpretations of documents and data using the methods, conventions, and assumptions of a specialized discipline--not the 'common knowledge' of a particular social class" (80). Rather than future citizens and leaders of a community, colleges perceived students primarily as apprentices in a discipline, and the value of a course "lay in its relation to the discipline, not to general culture or public discourse" ( Russell85). Robert Scholes argues that the graduate course became the model for the entire undergraduate English curriculum, including the general education courses, with English faculty treating all students as apprentice English professors.

Russell writes that while the university's research ideal "narrowed the focus of instruction to the content and issues addressed by research and thus narrowed the range of genres acceptable in academia," it also "distanced the faculty from lower-level instruction" (72). As university faculties gave more time to their research and their discourse became more specialized and removed from the discourse of the student and the public, Russell writes, educators simply "developed ways of living with [this tension], ways that marginalized writing instruction" (86-87), including research writing in the disciplines. At first students learned research writing in the courses in their major under the tutelage of professors in their major discipline, but research faculty abandoned much of this time-consuming work, assigning research papers but more and more expecting the freshman composition course to teach students how to compose them.

Composition faculty also had reasons for wanting to teach the research paper in the first-year course. Some may have been eager to take on research paper instruction at first as a way to enhance the prestige of the freshman English course, to move it beyond a course to correct students' literacy deficiencies by providing instruction in the dominant genre of the research university. Robert J. Connors, however, holds that composition faculty embraced the research paper to help them move the course beyond personal writing and introduce students to academic writing and to help them manage how students used library sources when they wrote. Personal writing had become the emphasis of the first-year course partly because access to the modern research library had made it too easy for students to crib a paper together from secondary sources. In addition, the concept of intellectual property had become so critical to the research university that composition faculty believed it was important to teach freshmen to avoid plagiarism. The research paper was a way to assign academic topics, to begin to teach freshmen an academic research attitude and methodology, and to ingrain in freshmen a respect for intellectual property laws ( Connors321-23). It was a movement away from teaching writing to explore personal subjects or issues of public import.

The assumption that students can learn to conduct research, evaluate sources, and write research articles as part of an introductory writing course, only to hone their research writing skills in later courses, is problematic, to say the least. The freshman research paper clearly has not satisfied the desires of the disciplines for students to learn to do academic research. As Richard Larson has argued, instruction in a generic research article cannot take into account that each discipline has developed its own research methodologies and discourse conventions even if each composition instructor could learn enough about other disciplines' research practices to instruct students in them (16-17). But the problem that Larson describes is not a problem of the research paper alone but endemic to the first-year composition course. As Sharon Crowley discusses in Composition in the University, for decades the first-year English course has "taught 'the academic essay' as though it modeled all possible genres of academic discourse" (28). The service of function of the freshman English course, to teach students academic prose for all departments in the university, necessitated the fiction of the generic academic essay, and the freshman research paper developed as a logical extension of that fiction.

Shifting the main responsibility for research instruction from the research faculty to the teaching faculty of the freshman composition course undermined the apprenticeship approach to teaching research. Rather than learning research writing under the watchful eye of a practicing, experienced academic researcher, the first-year student normally learns to conduct research from a graduate assistant, an apprentice scholar herself, or from a non-tenured faculty member who usually is given little time or incentive to conduct research and who may have little inclination for traditional academic research. The fact that these composition faculty frequently teach too many students and too many classes further erodes any apprentice approach to research instruction. The decision of research faculty to consign research writing instruction to the teaching faculty of a single discipline has also discouraged active discussions of the function and place of research instruction throughout the undergraduate curriculum.

To deal with the problems of the assignment, composition instructors devised an oversimplified and vastly distorted version of academic research procedures and a mechanistic and formalist approach to writing the research paper that freshmen could learn in a few weeks and that faculty could grade for adherence to format fairly easily. Just as the freshman composition course treated the long heritage of rhetorical theory and practices in a radically reductive way, it also represented the discourses and methodologies of the disciplines of the modern research university in a vastly oversimplified way. The process for writing a research paper that has dominated freshman composition instruction since the introduction of the research paper--select and narrow a topic, compile a bibliography, take notes, compose an outline and then a draft, and revise and edit the draft--and the common practice of students grabbing any sources that they can find off library shelves until they have enough to meet the assignment's minimum requirement for works cited parody the research methods of scholars and provide little help to a student asked to write something original. Textbooks have typically represented research as little more than using catalogs and bibliographies to find texts about a subject and then taking notes. And instruction on research writing in English 101 has seldom been followed systematically by more sophisticated instruction in sophomore, junior, and senior courses.

Perhaps the greatest problem of research paper instruction has been a failure to treat this assignment as a reading-to-write assignment that requires instruction in critical reading strategies of sources. Although most textbooks tell students to distinguish between "biased" and "unbiased" sources, instruction on how to do this is slight. "Instructions on detecting bias often amount to not much more than whether an argument sounds good," Kathleen McCormick concludes after examining several recently published research paper textbooks (217). According to McCormick, textbooks usually credit students "with having an intrinsic ability to distinguish--without training or even explicit instruction--biased from objective sources" (216). That has begun to change. Chapters on critical reading strategies have become popular in recent composition textbooks, and composition scholars such as McCormick, Doug Brent, and Margaret J. Kantz have developed research paper pedagogies that apply reading theories and research. But a serious attempt to address the importance of critical reading in research and in writing in general is difficult to implement in one already crowded course, again raising questions about the content and functions of the course. Just as important, serious implementation of reading instruction into the course would have to involve significant changes in how graduate students are educated to teach writing. On most campuses the composition movement has succeeded only in establishing one practicum course in teaching writing usually coupled with some observation, mentoring, and/or interning of teaching assistants as the standard education for writing instructors, hardly an adequate amount of instruction considering the complexities of writing instruction. To add adequate instruction on theories and approaches to teaching reading of nonliterary texts would probably need to involve an expansion of this instruction and changes in the graduate curriculums in composition studies to include reading research, not to mention adjustments in college English departments' assumptions that reading instruction is the job of high schools and remedial programs.

The situation suggests that universities' desire to teach most undergraduates how to conduct academic research may not be a strong one. If it were, universities should have abandoned their present approach to research instruction long ago. Graduate school enrollments and the oversupply of Ph.D.s in many fields suggest that the current system prepares more than enough students for graduate school to supply colleges and universities with the faculty and research assistants that they are willing to hire. One reason this haphazard approach to teaching research has continued may be that it encourages future professionals to become consumers of the knowledge that the research university produces. Despite recent definitions of reading and writing as "meaning-making activities" and students as "makers of knowledge," textbook representations of the composing process of research papers have been dominated by a reverence for expert knowledge and opinion that encourages students to be uncritical consumers of the knowledge and claims of university scholars. A common assumption of textbook instruction, as Crowley writes, is that "opinion could be accepted as fact when the person who expressed it was an authority" ( Methodical110).

Such a position makes it unnecessary to use critical reading strategies when conducting research. Most textbooks have instructed students to evaluate a source before reading it, to trust in the credentials of the author. Hodges instructed students to evaluate a source much as one should evaluate merchandise, checking for signs about whether the information inside the source was good: "One important consideration always is the reliability of the source. Does the author seem to know his subject? Do others speak of him as an authority? Is he prejudiced? Is the work recent enough to give the information needed?" (370). Some knowledge goes bad after a while. Once a text is certified, the information should be good. Kathleen McCormick's examination of recent research paper textbooks suggests that textbook advice on evaluating sources has changed little since Hodges. Textbooks often signal that sources that support the dominant view of a subject are not biased, recommending that students only check the credentials of the author and publication and rely on their "common sense," which, McCormick writes, "is surely the most unreflective means of passive acquiescence to the dominant that exists--and something that research should help to problematize rather than justify" (217). Textbooks privilege "objective" and "authoritative" sources as political and moral authorities, describing them with terms such as "reliable," "authentic," and "trustworthy" ( McCormick213-14). "Sources that are outside the mainstream, in contrast," McCormick writes, "are 'worthless, silly, and misleading,' 'controversial,' and of course 'biased'" (214).

The research mission of the modern university, the service nature of the first-year English course, the gulf between the research faculty who establish many of the demands of the first-year course and the graduate students and the nontenured teaching faculty responsible for carrying out these demands, and the current-traditional rhetoric that dominated composition instruction during the development of research paper pedagogy have worked together to create a required writing assignment that does not prepare students for the audiences, purposes, situations, and genres that most will face in their writing projects after college; to foster an unreflective acceptance of expert opinion; and to develop a pedagogy that teaches a mechanical and inadequate approach to writing, research, and reading. There are, however, movements to reform the research paper. Ken Macrorie's I-search paper, which tells the story of the writer's research on a matter of personal importance, has become a popular alternative or supplement to the academic research paper and an argument that research writing does not have to be academic discourse. The concept of student research has been expanded to include more than library research, to include interviews, field research, and the Internet. Composition scholars like Doug Brent, Margaret J. Kantz, and Kathleen McCormick have developed reading-to-write pedagogies to teach students to read their sources critically and assess what they have to say. Computer developments likely will lead to adjustments in teaching the research paper. Concerns about the quality and reliability of sources on the World Wide Web have made evaluation and critical reading of sources a more important concern--current-traditional instruction tacitly depended on editors, publishers, and librarians to steer students away from sources that were not authoritative. And the availability of simple and inexpensive bibliography programs should make it unnecessary for teachers to spend much classroom time lecturing on MLA format.

But tinkering with the assignment probably is not enough. University faculty as a whole, research faculty and teaching faculty, need to discuss the purposes for teaching research to undergraduates, what research methodologies undergraduates should learn, how research instruction should work together with writing instruction, and how undergraduate curriculums should try to accomplish these pedagogical goals. These discussions should consider not only disciplinary interests in teaching research methodologies but also the uses students will likely make of research in their lives and careers. While writing based on research certainly has a place in the first-year composition course, it is not at all clear that there is a compelling need to teach freshmen to write a generic academic article. If it is important for students to learn to compose academic articles, it is also important that they learn to use research to write other genres for other purposes and audiences.

I doubt that we can come to terms with the freshman term paper without first coming to terms with the purpose and content of the required first-year composition course. The history of complaint about the assignment has been too long and ineffectual and the problems with the research paper are too closely connected to unsettled questions about who the first-year course should serve and what writing it should teach to expect easy reform or abandonment of research paper instruction. It may be, as Crowley has argued, that the first-year requirement is holding us back, that the universal requirement makes the first-year course too much a matter of contention among different factions in the university, that the requirement discourages other university departments from taking their share of the responsibility for teaching students writing and research, and that the first-year course is saddled with impossible demands. Clearly it is important now to discuss what the content and function of this course should be, what genres and research methods students need to learn in the first-year course, and what writing instruction students will receive after freshman English.