Head explains that this "exploratory" project entailed looking very closely at how upper division students really think and feel about conducting academic research and writing scholarly papers. "What is it like when a professor gets up in front of class and says here is your research assignment? What goes through their (students) heads? How do they conceptualize it in scholarly terms? How do they operationalize it? What do they do?"

The short answer is they get "flummoxed," Head claims. "They get horribly confused; they get disoriented." Why? One of the major findings was that professors don’t provide good enough instructions to their students when they hand out such assignments. Moreover, professors really don’t realize that students at this level typically have not yet reached a plateau of knowledge in which they can conduct quality scholarly research on their own.

Head’s research study was comprised of three phases. In phase one, discussion groups were conducted with 13 students with majors in communications, politics, economics, liberal and civic studies, health and psychology. In phase two, content analysis was performed on 30 research assignment handouts used by professors from a wider variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. In phase three, surveys were collected from 178 student respondents who were representative of an even wider variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

As noted in the First Monday article, Head summarized her findings as follows:

1. A majority of students began their research by consulting course readings or the library’s website for online access to scholarly journals. To a lesser extent, students used Yahoo, Google and Wikipedia as first steps.
2. Most students consulted aggregated research sources, many of which had been identified for their scholarly quality by professors, librarians or library databases.
3. Many students were challenged by research tasks, especially selecting and evaluating information and figuring out professors’ expectations for quality research.

"Professors often assume that students understand the research process as well as they do," Head notes. However, there is a "tremendous gap" with how professors think about research and actually carry it out themselves, versus how students think about and conduct their research. Professors typically have a network of colleagues and special information resources they can easily access to augment and speed up their research methods and processes - what Head refers to as an "invisible college." Students, on the other hand, typically do not have anyone they can call on. There’s no invisible college for students to access, nor do they have any kind of knowledge about who and what might be the most authoritative, trustworthy and classic resources in the field they are being asked to conduct research on.

Additionally, "professors really are not meeting students head on with coaching them in how to do scholarly research," Head says. "They assume these students have those skills, but they really don’t."

What are the consequences of this kind of misunderstanding between students and their professors? The majority of students in the discussion groups considered their research assignments as being "barley tolerable" tasks; plus, they candidly revealed that they had no idea of what scholarly research meant, Head says.

To add to what seems like an already bad situation, the content analysis portion of Head’s study found that course handouts offered little direction to students to effectively plot a research plan; guidelines for crafting a decent research paper were formulaic and brief; and the grading criteria was rarely addressed.

"What we found basically is that professors do not really guide students as far as what resources to use," Head says. "They do not point them in the right direction." When there was some kind of guidance included in the research assignment handouts, it was typically terse. Plus, most handouts did not have information about how students could assess the quality of the information resources once they were found.

Additionally, one of the major findings of the survey with 178 students revealed that 40 percent of respondents look at the textbook and other readings from class as their first step in the research process. Another finding revealed that the lack of assignment information caused 73 percent of respondents to procrastinate starting the necessary work.

Students are Ingenious

Despite all these seemingly difficult obstacles and challenges, "students are more ingenious than we give them credit for when it comes to research," Head explains. "They have developed a fairly complex strategy for succeeding. What they do is go to sources that they know their professor would consider to be scholarly. They go to vetted sources that are aggregated and reliable. So, they have found workarounds. This is one of the best surprises of the study.

"Their parameters of success are finishing the assignment and getting a good grade. So they try to do research that meets their professor’s expectations. That is why 40 percent go to the course readings first. These are sanctioned by the professor as good pieces of research."

Another surprising result of the study, Head says, is that many students do not just do a Google search, as is frequently reported in much of the literature about students’ information literacy skills, or lack thereof.

In the First Monday piece, Head noted that "whether these findings hold with students from other campuses is unclear. Further research needs to be conducted on campuses with different study populations." Head added, during the EdPath interview, that she is seeking funding and support for conducting a similar study with a larger, more diverse sample.

Last but not least, she offers three sound recommendations "for improving the student research process in a digital age," paraphrased from the First Monday article as:

1. Include more details in the research assignment handouts about expectations for conducting research.
2. Professors and librarians need to recognize students information literacy skills and needs and provide the appropriate coaching.
3. Don’t underestimate the value of "high touch" (human mediated) interactions with students.