Understanding Scholarly Sources in Conversation: Source Matrix Activities

Author
Daniel Emery

This semester, the Teaching With Writing program is placing a particular emphasis on the connections between reading and writing. Promoting effective reading practices can help students understand relationships between scholarly sources and how academic writing is produced, which, in turn, can assist their own writing processes and practices. This month’s blog post will introduce you to the source matrix activity, an approach promoted by librarians from Instructional Support Services at the University of Minnesota. This activity, which can work in courses of nearly any size or level of a curriculum, is designed to help students see relationships between sources and understand practices of attribution.

The concept of a source matrix

For many students, the collections of readings for a course exist only in relationship to each other. While instructors select and sequence readings intentionally and often describe how readings relate to one another in the context of the course, students may not understand the relationship of any published paper, study, or article to a broader set of conversations within a discipline. Creating a source matrix helps students to see how any individual scholarly publication is connected to a web of other statements.

Part one: Setting up the assignment

Choose a single scholarly article or research paper in your field, or select a research article that is already a part of your course readings. The focal document is the core of the matrix; since students will cluster their analysis around it, it should be organized in ways familiar to your field and published in a respected scholarly source. Your students should be familiar with the content of the article, its central arguments, and how the text is arranged.

Next, identify a few sources cited in the initial document. Ideally, the sources cited will come from different sections of the article and serve different purposes for the analysis. While you could assign a student to every item cited in the original document, a shorter list of essential sources can make the assignment more effective.

Finally, for the other half of the matrix, you can identify some sources that have cited the focal document. You’ll want to choose a published paper that has been put to use in multiple ways. Review essays and meta-analyses are often good candidates.

Part Two: What you’ll ask students to do

Working backward

After the class has read and discussed the focal document, assign students to search for and read articles cited in it. You might assign one source per student, or multiple students to a citation in a larger enrollment course. For each of those sources, ask students to…

  1. Read the referenced source to understand its topic, determine its central argument, and identify how it is organized.
  2. Add a citation for each source using the standard format of your field to a shared document (and perhaps include the doi, digital object identifier).
  3. Describe how the focal document uses this resource. What functions does the cited reference serve (to establish context, contrast with other studies, explain methods and choices, etc.)?

When students come back together, examine the shared document and discuss how sources are used.

  1. How are different sources used for different purposes?
  2. How are specific citations related to the function of a subsection in the paper?
  3. How does the writer of the focal document make these uses (both 1 and 2) clear with additional words or sentences?

You could end the exercise here and reserve the next steps for another assignment, or you could continue to look ahead from the focal document.

Working forward
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Once again, you will begin from an understanding of the focal document, but this time, ask students to read resources that you have identified that have referred to the focal article.  For each of these subsequent publications, as students to…

  1. Read the referenced source to understand its topic, determine its central argument, and identify how it is organized.
  2. Add a citation for each source using the standard format of your field to a new shared document.
  3. Finally, in the shared document, describe how the subsequent research or writing uses the focal article. What functions does the cited reference serve in this new piece? (to establish context, contrast with other studies, explain methods and choices, etc.)

When students come back together, examine the shared document and discuss how the focal document was used in subsequent research or writing.

  1. In what part of the article does the reference appear?
  2. Why is the focal article mentioned in the new publication? What might its location reveal about its function?
  3. How are scholars and researchers connecting to this research and extending it?

Examples of a source matrix

As an illustration, this focal document offers a recent review of strategies for teaching text integration in writing. Educational Psychology Review is a multidisciplinary journal used in a variety of fields related to learning and instruction.

A backward-facing matrix might look like this. Students would identify and cite the referenced work (for each section of the document) and explain its function in the focal text.

A forward-facing matrix might look like this. Students would choose from a selected list of articles that cite the focal document and describe how the original research informs the newly published resource.

Working from a single effective source can help students understand relationships among texts beyond their retrieval order in search strategies and databases. As students become more sophisticated in understanding the connections between texts, they will better recognize and work with the features of research genres in your field.

Meet with the Teaching With Writing Team

Each semester, we host the popular Teaching with Writing event series, offering workshops, panels, and discussions on writing-related topics. On March 16, we will offer a workshop on assisting students with summary, paraphrasing, and quotation. On April 1, we will offer a panel on multimodal assignments and offer free boxed lunches for registrants.

Visit the Writing Across the Curriculum Program and follow us on Twitter @UMNWriting. You can schedule a phone, email, in-person, or via zoom through our online consultation form. Our Teaching with Writing Program website offers teaching resources to faculty members and instructors across the University of Minnesota system.

References

Barzilai, S., Zohar, A., & Mor-Hagani, S. (2018). Promoting Integration of Multiple Texts: A Review of Instructional Approaches and Practices. Educational Psychology Review, 30(3), 973-999. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-018-9436-8