It was this mission that sent me to grad school, trying to figure out why schools were so afraid of students actually learning to THINK! How had things gone so wrong?
Got Cheaters? Ask New Questions. The Web puts answers to most questions -- not to mention ready-made term papers -- at students' fingertips. One educator says it's time to assign work that truly makes kids think. By Dustin Goot. [Wired News]
Jamie McKenzie has spent his whole career trying to get schools "to ask better questions." But now that he preaches better questions as an antidote for rampant Internet plagiarism, a lot more teachers are listening.
In the professional development seminars he gives, McKenzie said, 60 to 80 percent of teachers cite cases of plagiarism in their classrooms. A more formal study, conducted by a professor at Rutgers University, found that more than half of high school kids "have engaged in some level of plagiarism on written assignments using the Internet."
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Instead, teachers must distinguish between trivial research and meaningful research, which asks kids to "analyze, interpret, infer or synthesize" material they have read.
They say this is what the problem is, but consider the difficulty behind this when teaching the "research paper." As a kid, I hated school research papers, hated research. Until I learned how to do real research, as questions I really wanted to know the answer to instead of wank jobs to please a teacher, notes dumps, you know the drill.
BTW, if you want to see what I think are some good examples of students doing real research, challenging and collaborative projects for real audiences, take a look at http://www.nutball.com/laptopresearch, or even http://www.nutball.com/beheard.
Here's the rub. It is easy to assign "canned" research topics (hell, that's what the textbooks condition teachers to do) because they are easier to grade, just as easy to grade as they are now to cut and paste. It is hard as hell to grade more difficult research questions, especially if you require original research instead of secondary source research. It gets messy very quickly. And it is so labor intensive, students have to work in groups to get anything done. But sandbaggers and scammers still work, making one group member do all the work, or turning in sloppy, cribbed stuff to the frustration of their own group members.
A solution? I don't have one. Maybe a guess. The teacher should go on the research journey with the class--an entire class on the entire topic, with the teacher as another learner and collaborative group member, participating full on. Radical pedagogy and lifelong dialogic learning. If the question is real, the teacher should want to find out the answer through research as well.
Miasma
11:57:08 PM 
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