3 Reasons for Problems in Citation and Their Solutions
It’s really confusing for teachers that even their brightest students get confounded when it comes to citation. But students don’t have to get frustrated because even the great Isaac Newton had the same problem. He knew that he owed mentions to many scholars from whom he’d obtained pieces of great knowledge during his own research. Well, there are reasons why students find citation problematic. And when there is a problem, there is a solution too. So, here are reasons and their solutions.
1. Inferior Research Practices
Not all issues regarding citation are related to writing, but even to research.
You may think that there is such a great source named internet now available to students which makes the job of research so easy. However, it’s true that many don’t actually fully learn the skill of finding information, recording what they’ve learned and then organizing it into writing. Even students who have a great practice of writing essays may not have the same amount of practice of doing research papers.
In the flow of writing and organizing research notes, students may forget adding citations, and then they may have to keep struggling while recollecting which information came from which source.
Here the citation management software such as Flowcite can help them. This software helps you organize all the resources of the information and with technical formatting, so that you can prepare your academic paper perfectly. Since two former university students have developed this software, it has been developed with a vision of solving the challenges students face while writing academic papers.
2. Students don’t Already Know about Citation
Many teachers assume that students might have written a lot of essays prior to reaching their later years of high school or early years of college. But this is usually wrong. Students are writing less and less number of essays today.
A 2012 survey showed that students in top public high schools wrote less than five research essays per year. A 2016 survey of educators showed that they usually find it problematic to teach writing.
There are several reasons for this. Class sizes have increased which means that teachers are not very happy to give assignments like essays that are time-intensive. If this is paired with the fact that No Child Left Behind Law in effect until 2017 stressed more on multiple-choice reading comprehension tests and mostly ignored writing.
Whatever may be the reason, it’s cleared from another 2016 survey that students are deficient in writing skills. In other words, students are not actually writing as much as several educators think they must and are reaching the later years of their educational life without the skills that would appear to be compulsory.
Here too the citation management software such as Flowcite can help as it helps in collecting knowledge, do grammar check, have MS Word plugin, multi-tab structure and unlimited storage, and many such helpful features.
3. Differences in Citation Criteria
Today’s students are busy writing not only in the classroom, but also various other places and platforms like sending text messages to friends, posting on social media and overall interacting online. Problem arises with the differences in the citation criteria of these various communities and platforms. Thus, a student may share a quote on Twitter that carries a citation with just a link or a “h/t”, then go to Facebook to share a post that’s cited automatically and then to share a meme on Instagram with no citation at all.
So, students come across various citation methods none of which look like any of the established citation styles like Chicago, MLA or APA; this is obviously confusing for them.
It can be of help to teach citation code-switching to help them translate what they do naturally in an academic setting although the level of difficulty will increase as students today do more of their writing (and citation) outside their classroom.
Although newer education has created some problems, modern day technology has also invented solutions like citation management software tools which may overcome those problems and compensate for the deformities.
