Listening For Structure, Watching For Process: A Study Of Information Literacy From Digital Research To Final Paper, and The Challenges of Developing That Study.

The research process is complicated--for students writing papers and for scholars studying them. Our students struggle to find appropriate sources amongst a sea of data, and then to use what they find responsibly and effectively to create source-based papers. Those who would study that process in the hopes of understanding the challenges our students experience are faced with not dissimilar challenges as they manage and interpret data. For this group of new and experienced researchers, designing the study and securing IRB approval were easy; handling the mass of data generated and understanding the story it tells turned out to be more complicated. Too often, the story of research focuses on findings and obscures the work of generating them making replication difficult or impossible. This panel describes a new study being developed by the Citation Project (http://CitationProject.net), which replicates existing research by the LILAC Project, Whitney Olsen and Anne Diekema, and the Citation Project, and combines it into one study of a single group of students. Each of the studies we replicate focuses on different students at one moment in the research process; by focusing on the same students at each of those moments, our study provides a fuller picture of the research process and the relationship between the different stages of it. Research Team members will describe the study, share the provisional findings, and discuss the challenges they faced and how they responded. Audience members will be encouraged to share similar challenges and strategies for overcoming them