Reference Questions

Another reason for students to plan ahead is in case the TU collections do not own everything a student or ajarn may need. It would take some a time to use interlibrary loan and other services. The sooner the request for information is received, the sooner we can deliver the information. Since students may not have thought much about reference questions before asking them, we can help them concentrate and clarify their work by asking some of the following:

What is your class assignment?

What is being asked?

Have you asked your ajarn for details if anything is not clear?

Some students may feel shy about admitting to an ajarn that they do not understand part of a class assignment. Asking the ajarn further questions might just show interest in the subject and that the students are taking the subject of the class seriously. But they might think it would be an embarrassing admission that they are not keeping up with the pace of learning set by the ajarn. If this happens, TU Libraries staff can help the student understand the sort of questions that may be asked of any ajarn, who should not be offended by further need for information. For example:

What kinds of sources will we need to use?

The ajarn can save the student a lot of time by indicating that the sort of information that will be useful for a particular research project may be found in books, articles, government documents, online sources, or other places. Since the ajarn knows exactly what kind of research papers should result from any assignment, there should be no problem about questions such as how many sources should be cited in a research project. Students may be encouraged to ask:

What is the minimum number of research sources cited in the assignment?

This does not mean that the student plans to only cite the minimum of sources, not a single one more, and is trying to avoid work. Instead, it shows that the student understands that like any academic exercise, a sense of scale and proportion helps a great deal in getting things done promptly and efficiently. At universities all over the world, but especially in Asia, if assignments are given, plainly saying how many pages should be written, students sometimes try to show that they have worked a lot by handing in twice as many pages as asked for. In most cases, writing longer assignments does not mean that the student has understood the subject or produced more valuable work than those who hand in something closer to what the ajarn asked for. In fact, bringing in an academic paper twice as long as asked for may mean that the organization of the paper could be better. Or it might mean that lots of information was included that is not essential to the main point. As anyone knows who has written a lot of academic articles, it can sometimes be more difficult to write a short paper than a longer one. Part of this is because the student must decide what to include and what to leave out, instead of just putting in everything, and hoping that some of it is about the main subject asked for. We can suggest to students that producing too many pages may be like a person who at an academic conference is asked to speak for 15 minutes, but instead speaks for 45 minutes. This does happen at academic conferences, where generally ajarns do not appreciate it. Instead of crediting such speakers with having done more work than asked for, they may consider that these speakers who go on for too long must think they are very great thinkers, to make people sit and listen to twice or three times what was asked for. In a similar way, writing much more than required can suggest that the student did not pay much attention to the original assignment, since what was produced did not resemble what was asked for. For these reasons, it is good to try to fulfil the ajarn’s expectations. This is why asking the ajarn further questions about what is expected only shows that the student is trying to get it right. These sorts of questions are appreciated by most ajarns. So our staff might suggest that the student also ask the ajarn:

What type of articles should we look at?

Should the articles only be from scholarly publications?

Can the sources be from magazines and newspapers?

Should we look at a variety of different kinds of sources?

Knowing the answers to these questions should help the student get a better idea of how to go about researching any assignment. It would also help our staff know where to look to offer the best help to students as quickly as possible.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)