Cognitive Dissonance (Way, MaryEllen, and Erika)

- students can’t cope with the longer sources; students are lazy

• we ask a lot of students: choosing topics in which they’re probably not experts, writing longer essays than they’ve ever written before


• How much reading is appropriate?


• Should we dictate the number AND the length of the sources our students need to use


• We should induce some cognitive distress in students. Where do we draw the line between useful and overwhelming cognitive distress?


• Does giving students a number of sources encourage them to use convenient instead powerful sources?


• Can we individuate challenge by having students choose topics and sources of varying difficulty?


• Can we give them a “menu” of sources? Can we ask them to speak with the reference librarian for ten minutes to find appropriate articles for the topic?


• Students who have met with reference librarians to help them find sources have tended to be successful. Structure as a homework assignment.
  - Set a high bar, then allow students to negotiate down


• Alternate approach: you have to have X number of sources and together they make Y number of pages


• This is all just “housekeeping;” what really matters is the source’s purpose and students’ purpose


• Let’s ask students to think about the overall purpose of a source first; then they can summarize (or paraphrase) incompletely while still having understood the gist of the entire source.