Post number three

Before entering college have you written research papers like Shirely, in Kantz's article "Helping Students Use Textual Sources persuasively," in which you re-presented the research in your own words and gotten decent grades? What are your experiences now in college?

In middle school and high school we wrote at least one research paper every year. However, the papers were more geared towards the process of finding the information using the available resources than the actual final product. I always remember my teachers stressing the amount of sources we needed to get an A and we would get points on the notes we took on index cards before writing the actual paper. I can see that this was helpful in some ways because we really needed to do thorough research in order to get the desired grade. But it was also a problem because the final product and the amount of extra information not found in the research was not a large contribution to our final grade. In all of the research papers I have done prior to JMU I simply wrote my findings in a organized fashion with citations and got very good grades. Like Shirely I added little to know analysis of he information. When I came to college and took Gwrit we had to write a research paper and this is when I first realized I needed to change the way I wrote research papers. Like Shirely I was shocked when I received a C on a paper I thought I would get an A on. I am glad I had that experience early in my college experience because it taught me a lot about research papers that I had not learned from high school. I have had to write several research papers since for my history classes and have done well on them because I did not just regurgitate my research, I applied the research and formulated original arguments. I think high school teachers need to start to introduce this process sooner and not focus all the attention on research papers just on the research aspect itself.