“Partnering to Understand Undergraduate Research and Writing Longitudinally”

In her longitudinal case study of a single undergraduate, College Writing and Beyond (2007), Anne Beaufort investigates several knowledge domains contributing to students’ development as writers. As a team of librarians and writing faculty in research and teaching partnership, we hope to build on Beaufort’s work by examining and elaborating the role of research with respect to writing development by sharing findings from our own longitudinal study of undergraduates’ development as writer-researchers. Specifically, we are interested in the ways in which undergraduates’ research interfaces with their writing practices as they advance through their general education coursework and various disciplines. How do students perceive and articulate their understanding of writing and research, respectively and/or in interaction with one another? Have students’ understandings of writing and research changed since their first year? How so? To what do students attribute their shaping influences? To what extent, for example, are students’ understanding of writing and research influenced by the faculty with whom they study? In this panel, we present findings associated with a set of student case studies based on collaboratively coded and analyzed student interviews, triangulated with student process and literacy narratives as well as faculty interviews. Findings to date concern the unexpected role of students’ work with primary data (e.g., interviews) as well as differences among students’ reading practices, understandings of source authority, and dispositions. These findings have implications for students’ research and writing as well as for how faculty and librarians might teach research, including in response to certain challenges posed by information literacy in the digital age