The 5th issue of Debut: Thoughts and observations on undergraduate research

area studies, Debut, HEA, languages, LLAS, Open access, research, teaching, undergraduate research,

7 thoughts

I have spent this afternoon editing the next volume of Debut: the undergraduate journal of languages, linguistics and area studies. I am pleased that the journal has kept going and is now in its fifth edition.

Many colleagues complain that students do not like putting effort into work that does not count towards their degree. Much of the work submitted to Debut is based upon assessed work (I know this because they don’t always remove the lecturer name and course number). In most cases the student will have received a good mark (they often tell me this when they submit) and in some cases their lecturer has suggested they submit their work to Debut.

Their work is then reviewed by an academic in another institution who makes comments and recommends whether or not the work should be published in Debut. Few of these students, if any, will have experienced this double-blind review process. It is daunting enough for those of us with experience but for undergraduate students this is unknown territory. Last year I conducted a small-scale consultation on whether Debut should maintain the review process. I was fairly surprised that those who responded said that the review process should be kept.

 

After five issues I have the following thoughts and observations on Debut and undergraduate research in general.

  1. Undergraduate research publication completes the research cycle (Walkington and Jenkins) but only a very small number of students seek to get their work published.
  2. The review process not only prevents weak work from publication, but also good work on which the student is not willing or able to put in the necessary work to bring the work up to a publishable standard. In these cases I encourage students to persevere.
  3. What is the standard for publication in an undergraduate journal? This remains the critical question for me. Work on the linguistics of a ‘less-widely taught/ used language which received a first class mark on a general linguistics course often gets a harsh review from experts in the language itself. In retrospect I feel that many articles submitted in the first year of Debut did not make it to publication when they probably should have.
  4. Some reviewers think that certain topics should not be attempted by undergraduates (the subject of my editorial in this issue).
  5. Undergraduates do not necessarily know that multiple submission is not customary. On a couple of occasions it has been revealed by a student that their work has been accepted for publication in another journal and “is this a problem?” I don’t think that this means the student is a bad person—it merely shows that the student has not been told that this not considered the proper etiquette in most disciplines (I now mention this in the ‘Instructions for Authors’ page). It reminds me that undergraduates do not automatically know how academic publishing works, it does not automatically occur to them that this is something they should find out about and I suspect that few academics teach students about how academic work comes to be published.
  6. We allow students to submit up to a year after graduation. Sometimes reviewers suggest additional reading, sometimes from items to which the student no longer has access – another issue about closed access.
  7. As a journal of languages, linguistics and area studies Debut has a very broad remit. As editor I have to rely very heavily on advice from reviewers and it can be difficult to separate reasonable and unreasonable judgements.

In conclusion

I believe that discussions of academic publishing should be included in any undergraduate degree. Detractors might see it as ‘another thing to teach’, but surely an awareness of the process by which the articles and books they read came to be published must be seen as essential. Lecturers often complain about students citing unreliable sources in their essays and teaching them how to identify a good and bad source. However, a better, more detailed understanding of the process of academic publication may be a better way forward than teaching students to use context to discriminate between sources.

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Update on things

Islamic Studies, languages, learning, OER, research, teaching, websites, Yazikopen

No blog post for a while now. I have been busy with work then the Christian conference Spring Harvest. I’ll be back in work on Wednesday in London at the Islamic Studies Network workshops on partnerships then Thursday at our annual new staff workshop at Aston University, so it’s a while before I get back to my Southampton office.

I have been working yazikopen.org.uk, my database of open access language teaching research. I’ve now produced a flyer which people can print out to give to their colleagues/ students. It’s not the highest quality flyer, but it gives the necessary information and life has been very busy recently. It is also available on humbox.

We bought our eldest son his first train-set for his sixth birthday a couple of weeks back. We are already thinking in terms of extending his layout and I am beginning to reacquaint myself with my Science GCSE as I think about building signals and lampposts with LEDs and resistors and things. We have also had some problems with the free sat which I seem to have sorted out now. I’m spending more time developing my practical side right now out in the garden and around the house.

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Could KIS become the sacred text of university choice?

Key Information Sets (KIS), quality, training

Roger Brown is spot on with his recent Guardian article “Student choice is a myth - and it's immoral”. He starts off with a reference to the Key Information Set (KIS), something I have written about on previous occasions. Most of the information in the KIS is meaningless and is subject to manipulation by institutions in any case— if you start judging organisations by certain figures, the leaders of these organisations are apt to focus on improving the figures, even if they are totally irrelevant to quality. I’m yet to be convinced that any aspect of the KIS will be useful in informing student choice. I suspect that it will inform student choice, but in the same way that Mystic Meg informs people of which lottery numbers to choose.

What interested me most about Professor Brown’s article was this comment:

…the emphasis on student choice is actually immoral. It loads upon immature participants all the responsibility and risks of making the wrong choice, a choice that is hard to unravel once made.

I wrote a blog post in December which responded to an article comparing higher education choice to buying car insurance.

I said it there and I'll say it again. The two things are not alike. If my car insurance company treats me badly or put its prices up I’ll go elsewhere next year. I can replace my car if it dies on me, though I will be annoyed. If my house fell down I could find somewhere else to live. In North America graduates often refer to their college as their alma mater (that is a “nourishing mother”) – a sense of the great esteem in which one’s university is held. Despite all the emphasis on the rights of parents to choose a school for their children, research seems to suggest that a child’s life outcomes are influenced much more by what happens at home than by what happens at school.  Is a poor or regretted choice of university course as damaging as an uncaring parent? Is blaming an 18 year-old for making a poor decision in the choice of university like blaming a child living in poverty for choosing parents who don’t have much money?

The (US) Chronicle has just run an article about a graduate student called Monica Johnston who has an $88,000 debt. Part of the reason for her debt was that she spent $40,000 attending an institution with a great reputation, which turned out not to be right for one reason or another. Some of those commenting on the article suggest that much of this debt is her own fault for spending a year at an unsuitable college and failing to graduate. I know nothing about the college Ms Johnston dropped out of or the one she is at now, but the choice to go to that expensive college obviously seemed like a good idea at one point. It was not the right choice and it has substantially increased her debts. I’m not sure that a KIS or anything like it would have prevented her from going there. It may have actually led her to being more even more unsuitable choices.

A friend asked for my advice on applying for undergraduate courses last year. I was able to give some help, but I was shocked at how little help I was really able to give despite having spent the last 17 odd years studying and working in higher education. There are so many variables in play, different course content and combinations, reputation, distance from family and friends, and career possibilities (for someone who like many young people is not fully sure what she wants to do afterwards). The KIS would have been worse than useless and league tables are no use. In fact we could have ended up in conversations with me explaining that just because Course X has a graduate employment rate of 73% and Course Y of 75% does not necessarily make Course Y the better choice. But students will make choices on this sort of basis.

My worst fear is not that students will ignore the KIS. My fear is that it could become the sacred text of university applications.

 

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Social and economic background of applicants to study languages in UK higher education

languages, statistics, UCAS

Source: UCAS: Accepted applicants 2011 entry

Economic background of accepted applications for European Languages, non-European languages and All subjects.

Quintile (Polar 2)* European languages (Group R) %
 Non-European Languages (Group T) %
 All accepted applicants.%
1 (applicants from postcodes with fewest 20% applicants to HE (2000-2004) 5.80 8.47 11.98
2 10.27 11.48 16.45
3 15.49 15.99 19.57
4 25.06 23.04 22.48
5 1 (applicants from postcodes with highest 20% applicants to HE (2000-2004) 41.94 39.67 28.13

 

*See http://www.hefce.ac.uk/widen/polar/

Ethnic background of accepted applications for European Languages, non-European languages and all subjects.

 

  European languages (Group R) (%)
 Non-European Languages (Group T) (%)
 All accepted applicants.(%)
Asian - Bangladeshi 0.1 0.3 1.1
Asian - Chinese 0.4 1.0 0.8
Asian - Indian 1.1 1.1 3.5
Asian - Other Asian background 0.6 0.6 1.7
Asian - Pakistani 0.2 1.0 2.9
Black - African 0.9 1.3 5.0
Black - Caribbean 0.4 0.5 1.6
Black - Other black background 0.2

 

 0.2 0.3
Mixed - Other mixed background 2.0 1.9 1.0
Mixed - White and Asian 1.8 2.1 1.1
Mixed - White and Black African 0.6 0.8 0.4
Mixed - White and Black Caribbean 0.9 1.8 1.0
Other ethnic background 0.7 1.0 1.1
Unknown or Prefer Not To Say 1.3 1.3 1.1
White 89.0 85.0 77.2

 

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Are some topics off limits for undergraduate research?

Debut, research, student research

This is a draft version of the my forthcoming editorial for Début: the undergraduate journal of languages, linguistics and area studies. I have published it here as I think it is of wider interest than the LLAS community. Are there some topics undergraduates should simply not attempt?

Are some topics intrinsically too difficult for undergraduate students to write about? This question has been raised in some form by two reviewers in the past few months where a student has submitted a paper to the undergraduate journal Début which either engages with very complex ideas or attempts to challenge a well-established theory and offer an alternative. Should scholars lay off trying to dismantle received wisdom and attempting to make theoretical breakthroughs during their undergraduate education? Can undergraduate researchers genuinely advance the discipline? One might argue that if an idea is really good enough to be taken seriously by the academic community it is good enough to be published in a journal which is not restricted to undergraduates.

One of the most memorable incidents of my own academic career took place as an undergraduate. I was in a tutorial with a professor and three other students. I can’t remember what the trigger was, but he turned to one of my fellow tutees and responded, “You may be cleverer than me, but I have been reading this stuff for the past fifteen years.” He pointed to the books by Marx on his bookshelf and told us how difficult it was to really understand Marx, notably because his output was so enormous. If you wish to really understand something you have to do a lot of reading – that takes time.

But should a lack of time to read the entire literature prevent publication in an undergraduate journal such as Début? When we ask people to review for Début we send them a form which reminds them that this is an undergraduate journal and that their expectations should take account of this.  Some reviewers feel that certain topics should not be attempted at all. Others suggest that well thought out and plausible arguments and theories developed by undergraduates should be published, irrespective of whether or not the arguments are fully polished or the writer does not have a full grasp of the existing literature or that their ideas would not make publication in a non-undergraduate journal.

Although undergraduate journals have become increasingly popular in recent years expectations remain unclear. In the first Début editorial in spring 2010 I conceived of the aims of the journal as follows:

Début not only aims to showcase existing research and scholarship — it is also a form of training for the aspiring academic. Whatever its advantages and limitations peer review forms an important part of the process by which academic knowledge comes into being – it is perhaps a matter of concern therefore that many students graduate unaware of how the articles which appear in journals came to be there. The articles in this first volume are “first class” essays made even better. (Canning 2010: ii).

Début is a fifth issue is a useful time to return to the aims and objectives of the journal, but equally importantly a good time to remind ourselves of what Début is not. Début was and still is an undergraduate journal. Undergraduate journals complete the research cycle for undergraduate students giving them an outlet for their work familiarising them with the (imperfect) peer review process (Walkington in Corbyn 2008). I hope that everyone who publishes in Début benefits from the process and that readers enjoy the articles.

I sincerely hope that some of today’s Début contributors will become academic stars of the future. What we see in Début today may be the beginnings of paradigm-shifting work for the future.

References

Canning, J. (2010) Editorial: Introducing Début: Début: the undergraduate journal of language linguistics and area studies 1.1 pp. i-ii

Corbyn, Z. (2008) Let students enjoy the power of print. Times Higher Education, 7 August 2008.

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Event for new and aspiring lecturers

LLAS

Life and work in academia: event for new and aspiring lecturers in languages, linguistics and area studies

Thursday 12 April, Aston University, Birmingham

Fee:       £80 ( publicly funded UK educational institutions)

£100 (private institutions/organisations and non-UK institutions)

Description: Aimed at early career teaching staff in languages, linguistics and area studies, this workshop aims to complement ‘generic’ Postgraduate Certificate courses offered by institutions. The workshop will also be useful for experienced staff who are new to the UK and finishing and recent PhD students seeking academic employment.

The event will take a holistic and long term examination of the academic career and will include discussions of:

  • managing an academic career
  • career promotion and progression (for both fixed-term and permanent staff)
  • good practice in e-learning
  • assessment of student learning and feedback

 

Event facilitators:

Dr Marie-Annick Gournet, University of the West of England, Bristol

Dr John Canning and Kate Borthwick, LLAS, University of Southampton

Dr Carolin Esser-Miles, University of Winchester

Dr Marina Orsini-Jones, Coventry University

 

A programme of the workshop is available here.

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My new introductory statistics project- and what is introductory?

LLAS, statistics

The big news for me this month is that the British Academy has agreed to fund me to produce an introductory online statistics resource for students in the humanities under its Languages and Quantitative Skills initiative.

The first challenge is how introductory is introductory? We have all come across books entitled “X for beginners” or “An introduction to Y” which have us lost by the second page. They may be introductions to X or Y, but they assume that their readers know all about A, B and Z. We see statistics books with an introduction on page 1 and a plethora of Greek letters on page 2. We see ‘teach yourself’ language books which begin with grammar guides discussing nominatives, vocatives , instrumentals, perfect and imperfect tenses etc., etc. A couple of months ago this sketch from French and Saunders came back into my memory. A man sues guitarist Ralph McTell because he is unable to play anything from McTell’s  ‘100 Easy tunes for Guitar’, due to a lack of chord diagrams. Writing a book or developing a resource for beginners to be used without a teacher is a dangerous business.

I do see good examples too. I own books in the ‘for Dummies’ and ‘for Idiots’ range and I have been impressed with these and have not felt out of my depth with them and have had some success. I did manage to buy a house a couple of years back and I have succeeded in building a website in Drupal.

As Carol Voderman said in her report last year, pupils are doing trigonometry and algebra when they are unable to calculate a percentage. Does this mean that my introductory text will need to start with a refresher in basic mathematics, like how to calculate a percentage? I imagine my readers will have studied maths to GCSE at least, but there is no guarantee they will remember much about it. I am pondering this as I make a start on the project.

An additional challenge is not the how, but the why. Statistics courses often fall into that category of a ‘necessary evil’—boring courses which need to be done so that exciting things can be done later. In these days of the extensive monitoring of student satisfaction, these courses are very dangerous – students must be able to see the point. And statistics is usually the last thing students expect on their humanities degree—and frequently they don’t come across them at all.

I hope that my project will answer the ‘why’ question just as well as the ‘how’ question. It is easier to teach someone how to do a statistical test than it is to explain how, when and why you might use it.

I plan to update on my progress from time to time. I hope this post will serve to remind me of the pitfalls of writing an introductory text.

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It's not what you know, it's where you know.

assessment, Open access, research

Our brains respond differently to a painting if we are told it is genuine according to a study by academics at Oxford University.

Fourteen participants were placed in a brain scanner and shown images of works by 'Rembrandt' -- some were genuine, others were convincing imitations painted by different artists. Neither the participants nor their brain signals could distinguish between genuine and fake paintings. However, advice about whether or not an artwork is authentic alters the brain's response; this advice is equally effective, regardless of whether the artwork is genuine or not.

I wonder if academics’ brains would undergo the same process if told that an article was published in Nature (or whatever the ‘top’ journal in your discipline might be) as opposed to being posted on some random website or published in a low ranking journal (however defined). For the sake of argument I am assuming that the academics would only be looking at work which was good (the imitation Rembrandts were good paintings by all accounts.) I‘m not a scientist, but I know that Nature is good – at least that is where to publish if you want Radio 4 to notice your work.

Last week I attended a workshop for Islamic Studies PhD students in my capacity as Acting Academic for the HEA Network. A business academic told me about the Association for Business Schools’ journal guide. Each journal has been classified as 1 to 4 star (in parallel to the UK’s Research Evaluation Framework). It isn’t my place to comment on the policies of disciplines in which I do not have expertise, but this strikes me as a highly transparent way of assessing the quality of research—if you publish in a 4 star journal the article must be good, if a 3 star not so good etc. etc.  No arguments- the publication is the judge.

However this puts some topics off limits to academics wanting to publish in the top journals. I understand the top business journals publish little about Islamic Finance—if this is your topic then you cannot publish in the top journals. A humanities  academic from an Eastern European country recently informed me that research impact in his country involved publishing in ‘top journals’, in short journals written in English. Linguistic issues aside, one of the consequences is that he and his fellow academics have to write about the sorts of topic Anglophones (or more accurately Americans) think are important —therefore fewer academics are writing about their own country – they write about the USA.

In science PLOS One is an open access venue which is unrestricted by topic or by what editors think would be expedient to publish (important and popular not being the same thing).

This is one of the great advantages of the internet—we can have peer review, open access research which is not restricted to certain topics.

Under the current system the journal an article is published in is our equivalent of a genuine Rembrandt. It would be interesting if all inputs to the REF had to be submitted as plain text files to see if the efforts of the Rembrandts and artists of lesser reputation can really be distinguished. Brain responses might be the fairest method of evaluation we have available to us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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