Thanks to a nice post by Wayne Bivens-Tatum at Academic Librarian, “The Timing of the Research Question,” I ran across a really interesting article by a librarian and a writing professor that identifies the points of disconnect between librarians and freshman composition faculty over when a student should have developed a research question:
Nutefall, Jennifer E. and Phyllis Mentzell Ryder. “The Timing of the Research Question: First-Year Writing Faculty and Instruction Librarians’ Differing Perspectives.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 10.4 (2010): 437-449. Project MUSE. Web. 2 Dec. 2010. [link]
One of the takeaways is that librarians want students to develop a question earlier in the research process than writing instructors typically do. It is suggested that librarians and writing faculty have more explicit discussions about this issue and how it affects the work they need to do with students in their respective arenas (workshops and reference service points for the librarians and classrooms for the the writing faculty).