Research Papers: High School vs. College
The first time I wanted to give up on research papers was when I was doing a dual enrollment assignment on technology. I really wanted to add my own opinion, until my classmates looked at me. They all looked at me like I was dumb for wanting to put my own opinion on a paper. They told me that I was not supposed to put my own opinion, that most of the paper was just copy pasting. These people were in the top majority of the class. I felt I really had to listen to them because of that. When I finally got to college, however, one of the first things my English teacher told me was to do my own research and use my own opinion to support it. I never thought this was possible in a research paper. What I found was that the way we learn to write in high school is irrelevant in college.
We need to be aware of this because we as students may get stuck in one way of doing things. English at the college level isn't anywhere as stressful as it's made out to be. When I spoke to my English teacher from high school she noted that the way a professor teaches depends on their preferred methods of instruction. This got me thinking, why is the definition of a research paper different when people enter college, and are students confident in writing one or scared because they never knew what to do? How can this problem be solved?
Ultimately, to address this issue of research papers, I believe we need to change the way English is taught in high school, but this is not an easy task.
Students don’t feel prepared for college English classes when exiting high school. In "Understanding the Gap Between High School and College Writing" by Cheryl Beil and Melinda A. Wright, they convince readers that the way revising is taught in high school and the assignments teachers give us in high school does not prepare us for college level writing, and state tests reinforce it even more like the SAT. Writing assigned to students promotes deep learning but barely prepares them to write beyond academy level. “We are struck by the interesting lack of focus on audience and purpose by faculty in the disciplines—especially given the emphasis that rhetoric and composition and our textbooks place on it.” (Addison, McGee)
Womelsduff was successful in getting students to write with ease, and possibly might be able to get them to college level writing with enough creative freedom. The author Deborah Womelsduff does a test on her students. “The students in his 10th grade in class that did very well and were not the top kids had to say that they got to write about something they loved, so it made brainstorming easier.” (Womelsduff, Deborah).
These sources all bring similar questions, and arguments, and highlight some things we need to pay attention to. I personally agree with Beil, SAT should influence people to explore their creative mind instead of being so structured and formal. One thing I noticed from the second article is that the author made an educated guess. There’s no research on this. She based it off personal experiences or conversations with classmates. Sadly, most of the information on the second article isn’t needed and doesn’t really support her statement. Womelsduff has the right idea but with poetry, we should take her poetry idea and add it into research papers. Make research papers more creative. We should find ways to make them as creative as possible while still giving them purpose.
These articles show the similarity that high school students aren’t prepared for college English classes. They introduce a teaching flaw that almost all high schools use in their teaching plan.
Would it be odd to add that all four people that were interviewed agreed that they felt high school English didn’t prepare them at all for college level English? To my surprise, I thought the majority would say it was just copy and pasting along with citing your sources, and I thought I would ask around to have some people back me up on this, but I was completely shocked because the majority said that they felt like the research paper was giving them knowledge. What happened to the rest? Well one student reported that she had never done a research paper in high school. This is a government funded school with state mandated tests, yet some of their students have never done a research paper? That’s crazy insane how high schools aren’t giving the full curriculum to their students. It makes it extremely easy to pass a class without putting any effort at all. We all know those kids that graduated with us and skipped half of their entire school year but got boosted up so they can “graduate in time”. I’m quoting that because I remember those exact words from my high school counselor when dealing with record breaking skippers in high school.
I was curious to see how much of their text in a research paper was actual writing insteadof just citations. I asked students if most of their paper was copy and paste with quotes, and they agreed. Out of five university freshmen, they all said yes. These people aren’t losers, I chose these people because they’re the top student on each of my university classes. That means over half of the student’s research paper was just her pasting in his/her sources. I went back to my previous high school to get some opinions from English teachers who have had me as their student. It surprised me, both were teaching the same grade level, and were supposed to have the same lecture plan but they weren’t the same at all. I confronted my 12th grade English teacher and asked her “Hey, do you think research papers are supposed to have your opinion on them?” I thought I was going to hear a yes, but she responded with a no while the other teacher I had in 11th grade responded with a yes. That confuses me in a way. Why write a research paper if you’re not going to contribute anything new to it or make an educated statement on how the claim can be fixed. Funny thing is that half of my participants reported that imputing their opinion into a research paper was looked down upon. I added on to the conversation, “Why? My current teacher supports it and isn’t that what high school prepares you for?” She responds with a statement saying, “all teachers are different, you may have one that supports a new approach to traditional English and tries to make it engaging, but there’s also that instance where you’re going to have a professor who’s had the same lecture plan for more than ten years and she finds absolutely nothing wrong with it”. I realize I may have worded that last part to make the second type of professor sound unappealing but I’m sure professors like that still exist because they believe their way is the right way, and some people may agree, and others also won’t. If teachers are sticking to the same lesson plan for ten years, is this a healthy thing? Is this even a good thing? Technology always advances, and as each human generation goes one, they get smarter and smarter. A lot of things change within ten years, yet some keep the same lesson plans. Let’s not forget that ten years ago from now was the end of George Bush as president. Upon interviewing students in my local university, very few liked traditional English papers. It just doesn’t sound that appealing. I swear I asked the question as unbiased as I could. I tried making old ten-year English sound exciting, but you know, I know, that we’d rather go to sleep than read old literature. A ton of students like to add extra length to a paper when it’s not needed. Why is that? Well I mean I don’t blame them, this rough draft is due in less than 12 hours and sadly, I don’t have enough length to satisfy, so I can relate to them. Most students in my class agreed that they bs’ed towards the end of the paper to add length and fulfill writing requirements. You, the reader gets screwed here. The writer is wasting your perfectly good time by adding unnecessary length to a paper just to satisfy a requirement. All students also reported never even having the thought or idea of putting in their own research into a high school research paper. It really makes you think of the reason why anyone would write a paper if you’re not going to give your two cents on the topic. Speaking of cents, just a quarter of students in my university actually feel confident doing research confidently without any guides on format. That means most of them will end like me in high school. Sitting in front of a computer, while being extremely confused on what to do next. Most students said that they were given the option to research what they wanted but this is a tricky thing to say. Were they really allowed the freedom to research on whatever they wanted? Of course not, all of them had a filter. Whatever they researched had to be related to a certain person, place, or thing. Not everyone is perfect, and that goes for our teachers as well. Where am I going with this? A quarter of the students said that their teacher did not give them constructive points or any type of revision of their rough draft. This is done out of the fact that the teacher probably sees it as boring labor and doesn’t want to do it. I shouldn’t say I totally understand, but I do. I get lazy sometimes too. All my life I thought everyone hated research papers, but half of students said they loved them because they got to do their own research. That’s extremely odd. Which brings to one of my disclaimers. Two of the people I researched went to the same school as me, and they’re majors in film. The third is a rehab debilitation major and went to a high school at a neighboring city that’s still an hour away. The fourth is my engineering buddy who also went to high school around an hour away from here. These four people are also my friends because I felt that if I asked these questions to my friends, they would give me their brutally honest answer instead of getting an answer from someone who thinking way too hard on their answer and might filter out some words. Schools have repeatedly allowed our teachers to have a lot of control over their lessons, but this has led to a lot of inconsistency. We leave the classroom ill prepared for the next. I cannot count on my fingers the number of times I'd left one English classroom certain I "had it" only to enter the next and realize I don’t. As students we need some way to create our own consistency the best way is to learn it ourselves. There are students like yourself who don’t feel like they’re learning what they want to know. There are website services that allow you to hire better teachers. Not everyone had the money, but if you’re eager to learn, start a peer session with your classmates or interact on online forums. There’s so many educated people whose opinions are valuable on forums. The principle has the power to force English teachers into teaching ways to better understand difficult readings. Alongside making sure that every student graduates while having done a research paper. Teachers should also encourage doing self-research on their topic. It may not be always applicable but the fact that there were still students who taught adding your own research into your paper in unheard of is a problem. But at the end, it’s not impossible to do research on your own, it’s also not impossible to learn other skills on your own. If we want to have better learning experience in school, we should peacefully demand it. Start a movement and present it to the person in charge. We’re all human, and if done properly, anything can be changed.
Works Cited
Addison, Joanne, and Sharon J. McGee. "Writing in High School/Writing in College: Research Trends and Future Directions." College Composition and Communication, vol. 62, no. 1, 2010, pp. 147-179.
Beil, Cheryl, and Melinda A. Knight. "Understanding the Gap between High School and College Writing." Assessment Update, vol. 19, no. 6, 2007, pp. 6.
Womelsduff, Deborah. "The Paradox of Structure and Freedom: An Experiment in Writing Poetry." The English Journal, vol. 94, no. 4, 2005, pp. 23-27.
