Writing in the Disciplines Knowledge Base

Step One: Teach the Literature in your Field

Conducting original research is what makes a research report hard. The reading load is what makes writing reviews such a challenge. It is not enough to help students find sources on a topic. You have to teach them to READ in their field the way a disciplinary practitioner reads. This entails teaching students the kinds of genres they will encounter, the purpose of each genre, and strategies for understanding each. The medical field has done a particularly good job of modeling this because of the whole “user’s guide to the medical literature” movement that resulted in evidence-based medicine. (I’ll use the med field as an example because it’s easy to do so!) But every field has a body of literature its practitioners read. That literature is divided into types; the literature is evaluated for quality across those types. Students need to know this information. Call it something fun! — “the anatomy and physiology of the medical lit” or “the topography of reading in geology” or “taking a spin through the physics literature” or “a guided tour of the literature in urban planning”.

Note: We know there is variation in how even highly standardized texts get written. However, students will learn more effectively if you choose example texts that are classically, conventionally composed. Once they learn to read for standard structure, you can show them variations.

Big ways to think about the literature

Here are some typical ways that disciplinary literature gets divvied up.

• Scholarly versus Trade
  • I’ll venture a personal rant here: unless you only teach students going into grad school, most of them will not read solely the scholarly lit; they read the trade lit in their field. Even if you don’t want them to use the trade lit in your class, teach them about it so they know what it is, and how to use it.
  • This is easy: go to any professional organization, then to its publications. There will be an academic journal or two (maybe a lot depending on the organization), then there will be the trade literature — the periodicals, magazines, newsletters, and websites used by professionals in their every day work. Sometimes there will also be a public-facing publication. SHOW these to students. Examine the features of each (public facing and trade publications are quite different, but students mistake public for trade because of topics — you have to show them the difference). Talk about how to use them, how to choose among them.
• Original Research versus Secondary Research (and maybe case studies)
  • This is the realm of research reports versus reviews.
    • For research, include hierarchies of evidence, both the pros and cons
    • Teach IMRD and what each section accomplishes (a functional approach that works across disciplines)
    • For reviews, teach content and criteria-driven approaches (e.g. state of the art reviews versus systematic/meta-analyses) — for more advanced students, explain the pros/cons of each
      • Criteria-driven reviews employ an additional level of filtering that is most often related to methodology, e.g. only including RCTs in the final data set
        • Thus, they are often written in IMRD format though no actual intervention was performed (which confuses the heck out of students)
        • The inclusion/exclusion criteria should be explicit and robust (cogent, sensible, motivated)
      • Content-driven reviews are beholden only to the POV of the writer
        • Most commonly employed when there is not enough research available to systematize
        • Also selected when the POV is specific or idiosyncratic
          • E.g., not just the side effects of a medication, but the side effects most likely to result in patient non-compliance
  • Depending on field, case studies may be best as their own category as they are neither experimental at any level (thus not research) but a real-world, one-time event (therefore not a review)
    • Pedagogically very important (e.g. case-based learning)
    • Whole areas of practice may be devoted to this such as Failure Analysis in engineering
    • Design fields rely heavily on case studies and they are not considered a lesser form of evidence the way they are in evidence-based medicine
• Practitioner Guidelines
  • These can be clinical guidelines in medicine, standards and codes in engineering, statutes and laws in lawyering
  • It’s kind of fun to look at codes of ethics in professional organizations, too
  • May also include key reference texts practitioners use

 

Select a topic in your field with enough research history to have multiple genres associated with it. Then, show students examples of each — e.g., this is how asthma looks at the case report level, cohort study level, rct level, systematic review, meta-analysis. Let them read each kind and talk about the experience. This is hard work for them, but a guided tour through the lit will make BOTH your lives way easier.

Note: Another lesson we learned the hard way: choose articles that aren’t too difficult to understand when teaching students how to read/use the literature. You can still choose something fun or interesting, but students need papers that aren’t so content-crazy that they cannot focus on structure and form. For example, in the med sciences classes, we use mobile health technology as the key concept for finding articles. First, students do not struggle to understand how text messaging or video works as a piece of communication technology. Because the tech itself is fairly limiting, the interventions are not difficult to follow. Because text messaging is cheap, it’s frequently used with conditions requiring frequent monitoring or self-management, which include the “big” pathologies that most students have some familiarity with (e.g., diabetes, obesity, depression, asthma, addiction). Because the technology is still relatively new to medical use but feels very familiar to students, they are comfortable having an opinion, so more willing to risk making judgements. All of this means we can bring up studies in all kinds of genres, yet feel confident that students can focus on the form and structure of the text along with disciplinary thinking (e.g., scientific validity vis-a-vis clinical usefulness).

Page 2 — Step One: Teach the literature in your field
Page 3 — Step Two: Start with a short, controlled paper
Page 4 — Step Three: Teach students how to craft a point of view
Page 5 — Scheduling and Scaffolding