The New Digital Scholar: Exploring and Enriching the Research and Writing Practices of NextGen Students ed. by Randall McClure and James P. Purdy (review)

As evidenced by a number of significant and increasingly influential studies, including the University of Rochester’s Undergraduate Research Project, the ERIAL Project (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries), and the ongoing series of Project Information Literacy Studies, academic librarians and information behavior researchers have become more and more interested in examining actual student research practices in context. Drawing on interviews, ethnographic observations, and other data, many such studies have indicated that the complex and diverse nature of the digital information environment has altered students’ thinking about research and introduced new difficulties into the information-seeking and writing processes. One of the central implications of this growing and very welcome body of literature is that educators need to reconsider, perhaps radically, how we teach research and research-based writing.

Situated within and building upon much of the recent scholarship on student research behavior, The New Digital Scholar: Exploring and Enriching the Research and Writing Practices of NextGen Students addresses the need for large-scale changes in research pedagogy in a compelling and refreshingly nuanced manner. Edited by composition scholars and teachers Randall McClure and James P. Purdy and featuring a rightly enthusiastic foreword by Project Information Literacy researchers Alison J. Head and Michael B. Eisenberg, this collection should appeal to all librarians and professors interested in making research and writing instruction more productive and relevant for today’s students. Fortunately, while The New Digital Scholar stresses that rapidly evolving technologies have influenced student behaviors, it does not simply rehearse what have now become cliché generalizations about so-called “digital natives.” Instead, the book focuses on critiquing prescriptive and restrictive research pedagogies that foster student passivity and fail to embrace technological realities. The chapters that McClure and Purdy have selected argue for innovative teaching approaches that emphasize research and writing as linked practices and encourage students to see themselves as capable and active researchers who already possess considerable information and technology skills. Ambitious in purpose and scope, The New Digital Scholar ultimately wants us to change how we engage students in research across the curriculum, not just the technological tools we ask them to use. Moreover, McClure and Purdy make clear that the fundamental changes they advocate will require extensive interdisciplinary collaboration among all interested parties, including but not limited to writing teachers and librarians.

The collection consists of sixteen chapters, organized into four parts. Parts One and Two offer helpful background information on current concerns with the teaching of research as well as new empirical data on student research practices. Employing interviews, research logs, screen-capture videos, citation analysis, and other methods, the contributors present a comprehensive overview of the numerous challenges students experience in regard to research-based writing. For instance, Sandra Jamieson and Rebecca Moore Howard, the lead researchers for the groundbreaking series of multi-institutional Citation Project studies, point to the often limited and superficial ways in which students integrate sources into their writing. They criticize the academy’s undue focus on plagiarism, arguing instead for enhanced pedagogies that will “bring students to a deep engagement with sources.” (p. 128) The other contributors to this first half of the book address additional concerns, often in relation to how students perceive and use digital search tools. Mary Lourdes Silva encapsulates the general thrust of this research: “a ‘one size fits all’ IL curriculum does not address the technological idiosyncrasies of databases and the individualized needs of students in a general education class like first-year writing.” (p. 162) In short, the rigorous technological and intellectual demands of twenty-first century research necessitate the development of more subtle and creative pedagogies.

The contributors to the second half of the book respond to this call for improved teaching, with Part Three focusing mostly on the first-year writing classroom and Part...