While reading a post from A Learning A Day, I thought I’d keep the irony train rolling by linking to Rohan’s linked post from Derek Sivers about the perceived need to quote an idea’s source. Specifically, I wanted to respond to this point:
2. School teaches us to reference. But we’re not trying to impress a teacher anymore. And every unnecessary fact dilutes our point.
I often reflect on the learning objectives I expect to achieve in a course lesson while teaching. I try to parse out the meaningful things I want students to learn from rote procedural tasks that don’t serve a purpose. The last thing I want to do is to reinforce the wrong lesson or derive the wrong conclusion from a student’s performance (e.g. did a student do well on a test because they understood the material, or because they are good at taking tests?).
Derek’s point above about references is well-taken and got me thinking: why do I want students to cite their sources? I brainstormed a few reasons and listed them below with comments.
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I want a student to be mindful of their research process (procedure). | Having gone through writing my master’s thesis, it’s easy to lose track of references and citations if you don’t stay on top of it. This isn’t super relevant to most assignment learning objectives, but it’s a good practice to have before launching into a bigger endeavor or capstone project. |
| 2. | I want a student to critically examine their own knowledge (what do they believe to be true facts, where did that fact come from, and why do they think it’s true). | I’m not sure if making students cite their sources achieves this aim on its own, but I suppose I could use citation requirements to help guide them through this process. |
| 3. | I want a student to be mindful of idea ownership and give credit to people who have done work.
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I’ve used this mostly in plagiarism cases where students copied work and submitted it as their own. I try to distinguish between sloppy citing and outright theft, and I remind students that they shouldn’t get marks for work they didn’t do. I’m still undecided if this is a rule of the academy or a legitimate thing to prevent fraudulently passing work off as your own in the future. This point, though, is mostly relevant in academic contexts as opposed to Derek’s notes about doing this during conversations. |
| 4. | I want an easy way to see if the student did the work. | This is a trick I’ve developed to see whether a student giving me their opinion is right by chance, or if they have informed their opinion by doing the course reading. The same result could be gained if students inserted relevant information without citations, but the citations help to highlight this when I’m reading through their submission. In other words, it makes my job easier. |
| 5. | I want to reinforce good academic writing habits. | Using references is part of what it means to write academically, and is used as part of the integrity process. This is only a good reason if my objective is to teach/reinforce academic writing for students. |
| 6. | This is the way it has always been done.
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More cynically, requiring citations is part of the tradition, and who am I to question it? It’s not a good reason to require it, but it is what it is. I won’t included in the list to the left, but a more sadistic version of this is “I had to do it, so you have to (go through this rite of passage) too!” |
| 7. | I want to remain consistent with departmental policies and culture. | Whether written or unstated, most departments adhere to some level of standards. This was less the case for me in undergrad and it depended largely on the preferences of the prof. By the time of my thesis, I ended up developing a hybrid referencing system that did not strictly follow any of the major citation methods. I received no comments from anyone who reviewed my thesis on my citation practices. |
| 8. | It’s important to trace an idea’s lineage as much as possible to spot fabrication. | If you are going to insert facts or conclusions into your work, it’s important to point to where you found them. Without a citation or an adequate way of accounting for how you know what you purport to know, it’s possible that the information is made up. Being able to trace these things helps, albeit this is more useful from a scholarship point of view, as I suspect a lay-reader isn’t concerned with checking a text for factual accuracy and instead takes it on authorial authority. |
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Related – to see if a student is able to either properly reference work, or at the very least charitably restate ideas without dropping important content from the idea. | This perhaps falls under sloppy citation practices, but on occasion students will misunderstand a piece of text and paraphrase or summarize information incorrectly. Knowing where the student is drawing their source from can have pedagogical merit if you take the time to compare the student’s work with the source and discuss the divergence. |
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Related – when an author cites their sources, a reader can use the bibliography of sources for further reading.
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This is perhaps more for book nerds, but I love having references to be able to learn more for things that pique my interest. This is, however, not the context Derek is referencing when he discusses giving citations during a normal conversation. If Derek’s conversation partner was interested and want to know more, I’m sure they would ask Derek for more information. |
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More abstractly, knowledge and academics is a web of mutually reinforcing facts, so academic writing is an extension of that reality. | This one is a bit of a stretch as to why a student who is not adding to a body of knowledge is required to rigorously cite their sources in a pedagogical exercise, but I include this more epistemological point to try and be exhaustive. |
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It’s a symbolic representation that the student (in most contexts) is not generating new or novel work/insights that creates new knowledge, but instead is remixing ideas from other sources. | I think this is a good reminder of what the goal of the assignment should be (students are often far too ambitious in what they think they can reasonably achieve in x-number of pages), but I wouldn’t consider this to be an adequate reason to insist on proper citations. |
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Like other skills, the act of referencing needs to be practiced. | I’m sympathetic to this, but as Derek is implying, you should be practicing skills that transfer into other domains or that you will need. In most instances, outside of school you don’t need to cite sources. |
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Citing references is part of the argumentation process. In order to build a successful argument, you must clearly express and state your premises, which includes any premises taken from the work of others (either their premises or their conclusions). | I’m also sympathetic to this as I think everyone should keep in mind that arguments need to be made to help convey ideas. It shows the logical chain from premise to conclusion and seeks to make the implicit explicit, and the unstated stated. |
Other than a subset of the reasons above, a strict requirement for citations is often unnecessarily enforced in the classroom, and is almost never required outside of the academic setting. I think there are some good pedagogical reasons to have students go through the effort to cite their sources, but you should be intentional when teaching as to when those cases apply. For instance, I am less strict about my students citing sources and instead I look for them to directly apply material from the course in their assignments (instead of giving me their opinions).
I enjoyed Derek’s point about how citing sources is a common trope in pop non-fiction, which sounds like a convergence on my ideas concerning animated bibliographies, or Ryan Holiday’s “15 academic studies” comment from a few weeks back. Maybe Derek’s right – we should have more courage to integrate knowledge into our existing schema and be prepared to state things as facts instead of citing our sources. I’m not sure I’m prepared to abandon the practice wholesale, but it has given me something to chew on.
Stay Awesome,
Ryan
A Paramedic's Notebook 