What's the Point?: The Elusive Focus

What's the Point? Part 2

FOCUS FORMULATION

Some students don't understand the opportunity of the questioning nature of the task and so they "don't get answers," because they don't select topics that are meaningful to them. Indeed different assignments encourage different kinds and levels of focus formulation. While some students work purposefully to learn during their projects, others merely endure them, and only some students find the "fun and merriment" in information seeking. Many are confused about their task and try to collect everything they find. They have a "point in every direction," which is the same as no point at all. Still others do not understand that a focus can be their own, that they may form a focus, "see what they want to see." But they all can find or form a point, unique to each, and it is our role as mediators, teachers and media specialists, to help them achieve validation as learners and confirmation as individuals.

Focus formulation is the fourth stage in Kuhlthau's Information Search Process, a research based model of the kind of information seeking process that students follow when they do these projects. This paper will discuss focus formulation, as defined in Kuhlthau's research, and will present a modified version of the stages of her model, based on this researcher's dissertation study and continuing research. The dissertation results were limited to how students formulated a focus and their success during that process. This paper adds an initial discussion of the nature of the focus.

As an explanation for the persistent finding that only half of information search experiences result in a clearly formed focus, speculation is offered on a developmental perspective that allows each student, like Oblio, the option of a different way through the woods. Each of the characters encountered by Oblio during his journey helped him form his focus and represent pointers and pitfalls along the way. Their significance to focus formualtion will be discussed, not to belabor the story but to layer it loosely over the words of the students themselves.

The conclusion will suggest strategies for guiding students through the forest. While focus formulation remains complex and difficult, it can also be very rewarding. It is a process that we can both model and mediate with our students. Each student who finds or forms his or her own point becomes both more able and more likely to use ideas and information for information based learning and problem solving. The more we know about focus formulation, the less elusive it becomes, and the more available to more of our students.

The Context of the Study
Setting the Stage

The combined perspective offered by an analysis of open ended textual qualitative data and quantitative categorical data was used to study 103 high school students doing research papers in four English classes.(Burdick, 1995 & 1996) The reader must judge if the experience of these participants provides an accurate portrait beyond this sample of tenth, eleventh and twelfth grade students.

The university research school study site admits students to approximate a demographic cross section of Florida, and there is a broad sample of race, gender, family income, and academic ability. The students' parents, however, must choose this school for their children and provide transportation. They thus may be more involved than some other parents in their children's education. The school embraces experimental and innovative approaches and teaching practices. There is a library media center staffed by two full time professionals, but it was seldom used by any but elementary students. The secondary students in this study choose to go elsewhere to do their research, the university, community college, or county libraries nearby.

A diverse sample of data were collected from the 103 study participants and their teachers over the course of a trimester: quantitative Process Survey and Teacher's Assessment of Focus provided quantitative data, while students' personal documents reflected their thoughts and feelings and offered the opportunity to "understand a the situation or event from the point of view of its participants," the purpose of naturalistic inquiry.(Mellon, 1990) Later the actual papers of one class, the eleventh grade honors class, became available, allowing a fuller examination of the nature of focus formulation. There were 29 students in this class, and 27 of the papers, with notes, outlines, thesis statements and other materials were examined. All data were coded around common themes and analyzed for patterns and trends.

The study validated Kuhlthau's model with an Information Search Style Model which suggests that there may be levels of focus formulation. Successful students who formulated a clear guiding focus by forming a course through their information travels were called Navigators. The experience of the other half of students, which were called Tourists, followed a variation of her process model that is described here.

Two Paths to Focus Formulation
Two Different Ways through the Woods

Oblio had to see many things in the Pointless Forest and talk with many interesting characters before he realized that he had his own point, even if that point was very different than the point of his neighbors. There are many ways into and out of the Pointless Forest. Some visitors follow a preexisting path, some forge their own. There are different kinds of points, just as there are different paths. Oblio created his point from what he learned, so his experience followed that modeled by Kuhlthau.

Kuhlthau's model of the Information Search Process defines formulation of a focus as the "critical, pivotal point in a search when a general topic becomes clearer and a particular perspective is formed." For Oblio, it was the moment he realized that everyone and everything in the Pointless Forest had a point. It is the fourth stage in her six stage model. In brief, the stages are Initiation of the search (usually with an assignment), topic Selection, Exploration of the general topic, Formulation of a focus , Collection of information around a narrowed topic, and Presentation. Half of the students in Kuhlthau's studies and in the Information Search Styles study formed a focus as predicted by this model. The other half found a focus and took a slightly different way through the woods. They followed preexisting paths, rather than forging their own.

In Kuhlthau's model, focus "evolves from thinking and reading about a problem or topic." (Kuhlthau, 1993, p.173) It follows exploration of the general topic, in that the students had been reading for some time, and both precedes and guides information collection, although in a recursive, iterative fashion rather than a linear one. Like the Oblio story used here, students in her studies used "metaphors to express their perceptions of formulation . . . a thread . . . a story . . .a theme. "

Her Information Search Process model was especially applicable to that half of students. Focus formulation was assessed by the teachers on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being no focus and 10 being clearly focused. These scores were grouped. The distribution for the students in this study was as follows:

The Information Search Process for most of the students with an average focus had slightly different stages: initiation and selection were the same, but exploration led to touring a narrowed area (rather than focusing) and gathering information about it. These students were called Tourists (34). This touring and gathering was diffuse and exploratory. It did not lead to formulating a clear course to guide collection, as it did for the Navigators. However, it did lead to organizing and sequencing the information encountered around a narrowed topic, a "found" point of sorts, before presentation, and learning did take place. The final writing or preparation stage was the same for both groups.

This exploration evidences learning for a student if she or he comprehends what was explored in the information encountered, rather than being overwhelmed by it. And some students (17) did get lost. These Lost students would be those who become so "frustrated by the assignment that they never turn in a paper, or just summarize the plot," according to the senior English teacher.

The understanding that lead to learning for the group of Tourists was evidenced by comprehension. This comprehension was indicated by their ability to interpret and/or translate the information they encountered and to order and sequence it into another form, but not necessarily a personal perspective created from information interpretation. The senior class teacher said that for many students just going through the process and completing the project was a learning experience. She strongly felt that only the rare student who "just typed a bunch of quotes together to fill up the pages without any thought or reflection" didn't learn from the process. Again, these would be the Lost students.

Kuhlthau's clearly defined focus can then seen as an alternate and perhaps more expert approach that is not appropriate, however, to every assignment or information search process task. The less clearly focused should not be discounted, however. These levels may be influenced by subject area or assignment, they may be a matter of personal preference or they may be developmental.

the journey is often the point

Neither Kuhlthau's studies nor this study can say what effect development, cognitive, epistemological, or affective, may have on focus formulation. It is a provocative question, worthy of further research. Prior research offers a context for understanding.

In order for students to focus successfully, they must have both the desire and the ability to do so. The ability to do so is impacted by developmental and epistemological issues. Students must reach Piaget's formal operations stage before they are able to think abstractly and hypothesize. They must have an epistemological perspective that allows them to see that knowledge can be constructed and is contextual rather than absolute. And they must be developmentally able to form, hold, and express a personal perspective.

Perhaps the less clearly focused students are evidencing a developmental level or epistemological stance. Such a stance may or may not be mutable. Perhaps they are approaching learning differently. The narrowing of a chosen topic may be a way of exploring through information that is valuable in itself, a "tour" of that information, so to speak, that may lead to a future focus, although that is not necessarily so. Time was a critical factor in this study. There were many time demands on these students, and they may have lacked the time Pitts said was so necessary for thinking and reflection while engaged in an information search project.(1992) One honors boy recognized this need when he wrote, "The paper may be on the backburner, but it's still on the stove. For a paper like this, you always gotta have it in mind, even if you're not actively researching at the moment." A focus needs time to jell.

Some of these students may not have had enough time, and their thoughts remained inchoate. Others' cognitive development may not yet have progressed beyond the stage of concrete operations. While all of the study participants were chronologically capable of such development, it is not certain that it had occurred.

Sometime between the ages of 11-15, according to Piaget, (Tuckman, 1992) children begin to progress from the stage of concrete operations to the formal operations stage, a change which does not take place in all children. Concrete cognitive operations emphasize sequencing skills that require some mental arrangement or classification. During this stage students would not be able to formulate a clear focus requiring abstract synthesis and analysis. During secondary school, the formal operations stage may emerge, during which students can think abstractly and can form an hypothesis (one kind of focus), for example. It may not emerge even into adulthood, which may explain why there is the split of half clearly focused and half not that is persistently evident in these studies.

In addition to developmental stages, certain epistemological stances support a certainty approach to information seeking that may be incompatible with focus formulation. Perhaps these students saw gathering as the most available way of knowing or obtaining knowledge. Such a belief is more suggestive of Belenky and her colleagues' Received and Subjective knowers (1986), Baxter Magolda's Absolute knowers (1992), and Perry's Dualists.(1970) Many of these students did not see knowledge or information as inconsistent. They saw the information and ideas they encountered in the information landscape as facts, their observed version of reality, what they saw along the way. One senior boy asked, "Why do we have to research something if someone else already has?" His query certainly indicated a belief common to many of these students that "someone" had resolved all of the issues or had all of the answers. Few of these students said that they saw information as inconsistent or incompatible.

The "many ways to view the world and many formulations" may be overwhelming to those students who see knowledge as certain (and whose classroom experience has promoted such an epistemology). It seems unlikely that such students would be able to formulate a focus based on constructing knowledge. And certainty was the implied epistemological stance of many of these students, as we see in many of their comments. "It has to have been done already for you to be able to do a research paper on it," said one girl. Consider the comment of a senior girl, "If I'm trying to find info. on a health problem that a friend of mine has I look it up, understand, and that would be the end of that." Such certain answers are most often elusive.

A third developmental concern may be involved, the affective component. Exploration without focusing may be more developmentally appropriate for some adolescents. Erickson's psychosocial development tasks postulate that one adolescent developmental crisis is to establish a personal identity, during which the adolescent, like Oblio, decides who they are, what they are good at, what they like, and what they hope for. The alternative to successful resolution of this crisis is confusion. A clearly defined personal identity is still evolving for many of these students. While they are gathering "lots of information stuff," they may be exploring possibilities, and there was a strong "trying on" quality to the interest in the conflicts and personalities of the authors studied. More is going on than learning in these projects; self validation and differentiation are taking place. Exploration through information and ideas offers a way to try out different identities, to vicariously experiment with alternative perspectives. Recall the Pointed Man who points in every direction.

Adolescence is a developmentally challenging time. Students of this age vary considerably in their cognitive and affective developmental levels and their assumptions about knowledge. It may be that there are differing developmental stages in information seeking reflected in the two groups, those who explored around a narrowed topic and those who clearly focused. It may be that information is perceived as knowledge to be found for the former and knowledge to be formed for the latter. It may be that the emphasis on gathering is a transition from collecting what others say to developing one's own voice. It may also be less a matter of development, which impacts the ability to focus, than of preference, which impacts the desire to focus. It may be all of these.

It is appropriate to acknowledge and understand the experience of less focused students, since they make up half of the whole, as well as the experience of those who clearly focused. Their experience was certainly different, but not necessarily less, than that of those who formed a guiding focus. Most of these students did not evidence the difficulties predicted by Kuhlthau's model for those students unable to focus. They were content with their approach, and their comments indicated efficacy. They had no desire to focus, except that imposed by their teachers. Some of them became highly involved in their projects, and found the Point Sisters' "fun and merriment."

The students in this study clearly fell into these two groups. Acknowledging and accepting these different types of information search styles affirms that each is valid, although they vary in approach and perhaps in purpose. This does not suggest a return to an emphasis on location skills or sources. Information is still a tool for understanding, not an end in itself. Some students learned in a diffuse, exploratory manner. Their explorations may ultimately lead them to charting a future personal perspective on information encountered that they are not yet ready to make. They may need more time in the forest for that future transformation, but not necessarily so.

Pointers and Pitfalls along the Way

"You don't get answers in this world unless you ask questions."
The Leaf Man
Different assignments reflect different questions

The teachers' assignment asked the initial questions here, subject to the interpretation of the students and perhaps the nature of the information encountered. Some assignments more readily encourage focus formulation. Others were strictly factual and encouraged a less focused approach. There were both types of assignments given in this study, but with encouragement for individual interpretion within even the more factual one. The geographic assignment might have been limited to the very factual, but it offered students an opportunity to explore.

This teacher encouraged her students to focus and to "immerse yourself in the country." The assignment sheet told them to "Take a bath in your topic! Have fun! Feel what it is like to live, work, and celebrate in this with these people." They were told to "gather information, but they were also to provide "an overview" and a "critical evaluation."

The teacher asked students to take a personal perspective, to focus, but she also wanted exploration. She followed the exploratory learning method proposed by Resnick (1989) in which the teacher sets the general goals for students who then focus on particular subgoals of personal interest. Interest may thus guide the students, who may also be guided by a coherent goal. One such goal might be deciding to learn. In this class the teacher set the general goal to explore a country; the subgoals were to decide what information to present and how to make that information interesting to the others in the class, based on each student' personal interests. The students noted that with this broad geographic assignment, as one tenth grader said, "you weren't proving a point or anything like that." Yet clearly focused students in these classes (the half and half distribution held here as well) found a personal perspective and became wrapped up in their projects. They planned to play music or cook special dishes as part of their presentations. They found a guiding interest. One junior girl focused on the romance of Egypt, a boy the isolation and cold of Antarctica. Another focused on the history of her country, which she discovered had "all the elements of a blockbuster novel."

The assignments in the honors and senior English classes emphasized a more traditional kind of focus formulation. The teacher of the honors class insisted that the "entire paper had to be dedicated to the thesis." In this class a focus was called a "thesis." The honors class teacher actively encouraged his students to discuss their thesis statements with him and required them to turn them in before their papers. It was defined by one student as "just one statement which controls our report." This was a new concept for many of these students. Others referred to it as "narrowing," and one student found it was "easier to write a good report with a narrow topic, because it gives you a smaller amount of information to handle."

How that narrowing and focusing might be accomplished brought back one research question that had remained unanswered. That broad question was whether or not males and females differed in the nature of focus formulation. The question was posed because of the findings of a study which had had suggested separate and connected ways of learning.

The study that had prompted the original research question suggested that there might be differences in the nature of focus formulation by gender.(Gilligan, Lyons, and Hamner, 1990) That study reported that the more comfortable learning pattern for females was that of the connected knower who works from a contextual, particularistic perspective that includes feelings. Connected knowers want to understand. They may prefer a narrative approach. They pose questions, suspend judgment, and prefer dialogue, discussion, and fact gathering. Contrast this with the separate knower, what their study identified as the more male perspective. Separate knowers work from an abstract, generalizing perspective. They want to criticize, to prove, or to answer a question. Theirs is an objective approach. They seek rules, and there is little room for feeling in their style.

Separate and connected papers were both evident in the papers that were examined, with most students using a connected approach. Most students wove their papers discussing and narrating a common theme. Only four of the 27 papers were written with evidence used to prove a point. However, the English class assignments would tend to favored the connected approach, perhaps making the question one of content area rather than individual preference. Further research is needed to define focus formulation approaches in various content areas.

The Leaf Man's point is to produce leaves,
while the Point Sisters' point is fun and merriment as they dance and frolic.
Topics for learning and topics for pleasure

The topics selected by students reflect where they go on their information journey, which strongly influences their experience of the journey itself. An assignment can banish students directly to the Pointless Forest or allow them to at least choose where in the forest they will visit. Within the broad areas of their assignments, to write a research paper on a country or an author, all of the student participants were given a choice of topics. Most were grateful for this opportunity and recalled projects where the topic had been arbitrarily assigned with dismay. A number of reasons were mentioned for topic selection, and most students gave considerable thought to what they would investigate. Interest and learning were equally important reasons, and there could be what one student called "a strong personal investment" in both. Almost all initially picked something about which they cared strongly about or wanted to learn. They were drawn by the foreign and exotic natures of what they soon called "their" countries with the geography assignment. The students doing the literary assignment were intrigued with the inner turmoil and personal conflicts of "their" authors as people.

If they could not summon up at least a detached interest in their projects, if they didn't care about either their topics or the learning, their work suffered and their experience of the project was most negative. While not directly related to focus formulation, topic selection could enhance motivation to learn and provide needed impetus to complete these complex project.

There were a few students who did not choose their topics, who just "did what they were told" to do by teachers or friends. Providing some guidance is an opportunity to help, but dictating is not. "I'm not sure what I want to do so really I want someone to help me find a topic or pick of the one [sic] I have that would be good." One of the least focused honors girls just "picked the one he [her teacher] told me to do" and had a difficult time motivating herself to do more that summarize the plot. She wrote that, "I was searching for a grade." She was so bored with her topic that she said she would have to "force myself to finish" this. One senior boy noted his total "lack of motivation" to complete his project, because he had hastily selected an author who did not interest him.

Involvement was a concept that emerged from that study that is also relevant here. Like topic selection, involvement was not directly related to focus formulation, but it did make the trip through the woods more fun. Involvement levels varied from positive excitement to boredom and negativity. Students formed three groups called Involved, Detached, and Reluctant to connote their experience.

An Involved student became attached to the topic and/or the project during the process, which included other ups and downs of mood, of course, but ultimately resulted in some pleasure, excitement, or enjoyment. These students found doing their projects interesting and fun, intrinsically valuable. Involvement implies a connection with the subject matter that was not evident in the other students. The student, for example, "really gets into" the topic or the project. They find the fun and merriment of the Point sisters, as described by these four involved students:

• "Time flies when you don't look at the clock; your paper gets filled with words when you don't count them; work gets done while your doing it."
• "With my topic I feel very at home. I feel like the information just pours out to me. I love my topic and I can't wait to do more."
• "I'm actually having fun."
• "I thought first of all that it was going to be just another boring time-consuming paper about something I'll never see, or touch, or think of ever again as long as I live. . . Then my mind began to go off on wild tangents and I was seeing myself write about this man, Franz Kafka, and actually having fun with it and learning something new. I knew right away I wanted to study Franz Kafka and learn about his symbolism and his writing styles."

Kuhlthau said that the "creative process of learning from information should be pleasurable. We overlook an essential human element by not investigating the play aspect of information seeking."(1993, p. 124) The students who became involved captured this element of play even when they found the task difficult: "The pleasant thing about this project is learning all about France because I've never been there and I want to learn more about it. The project is not very easy at all."

These students became engaged in the topic/project, and evidenced the "increasing interest" that would be expected to accompany focus formulation in the Information Search Process model. As has been mentioned, involvement was not necessarily related to focus formulation. One girl never formed more than a vague focus, but she said, "My topic is a lot more interesting than it was before. I already knew some stuff about it, but once I started to research the topic, it became a lot more interesting."

Contrast these Involved students with the Detached student who evidenced flat affect about his or her topic or project. There was often a mild initial interest, but no real involvement. They liked the fact that information could be manipulated and moved around. Such a student might "like" a topic in the sense of being satisfied with his or her choice, or wanting to learn about it, but there was not much personal involvement with it. They typically distanced themselves from the subject matter, but did express some ownership of what they were able to do or accomplish about the topic. The project could be seen as a job, a task, or even a chore, but still an opportunity for learning

There was a third and troubling group of students who remained Reluctant. They evidenced negative emotions including extreme boredom, disinterest, and distaste about the project or topic. While most of them finished their projects, they were loath to do so and will be unlikely to use information outside of school projects on their own.

The Reluctant students often saw their projects as "busy work." For example, a junior girl found her project experience to have "been pointless. I haven't gotten anything that I care about from this experience," despite the fact that she was able to successfully formulate a clear focus. She recognized that her negative experience might have been improved if she had picked a different and more involving topic. In her words: "researching the library for a topic that could be of great use to me, that I want to know about, is a much better way of learning. To complete this project, I am going to have to force myself to sit down and do it, but if I was researching something important, that I enjoyed, I wouldn't want to reach the point that I know everything, [but] this project has become an annoyance. I am so tired of thinking about it, I wish it would go away."

"A point in every direction is the same as no point at all."
The Pointed Man
More is not Better

The groups of students who produced different levels of focus formulation also focused differently. Too little data is available to consider these generalizable findings, but in this class, the resultant papers reflected the following differences:

Poorly focused papers were collections of loosely related information. The students who wrote them seemed to include everything they found about their topic. Wanting to collect lots of information, to get "more ," was a frequent refrain in students' document. For some students it indicated a limited understanding of what it was that they were to do. "Stuff" was the word used to describe the information they encountered as they explored their subjects. Poorly focused students perceived their task was to gather and collect this stuff...the more the better. In the honors class, however, one of the few vaguely focused students commented that "my entire paper was quotes and paraphrases. . . can't seem to focus."

Students' emphasis on gathering was understandable. Gathering was active, it was easy, and teachers seemed satisfied with it, at least initially. Gathering information led to feelings of accomplishment and reduced the students' anxiety. As one girl said, "when I do find things, well, information, I'm relieved." Another boy wrote, "The easiest thing or the most pleasant thing is finding the information and sources." There were many such comments:

• "I've had no trouble finding books and other sources to use."
• "Surprisingly I found more than enough books to create my bibliography."
• "I'm amazed how easy my materials are coming to me."
• "I feel very positive about how my written report is going to be. I feel that I have collected a lot of good information on my topic."

Coming to a personal perspective or guiding focus from the information encountered was far more difficult. The students who emphasized collecting information often were less clearly focused. One senior girl worried, "I just can't get anywhere. I just keep going around in circles. I have a lot of information but I can't get it organized." A junior found it "difficult to wade through the info. to get exactly what I want." She expressed her frequent frustration with "thinking about exactly what I am going to say in my paper and how I am going to say it. I have lots of notes but I don't know exactly how to start putting the paper together."

It was easier to just collect more information. Less focused students were likely to string these facts together without any organization. One planned to "throw something together this weekend." As has been noted, the most poorly focused papers were collections, collections without organization, of quotes or biographical episodes, of important facts or an author's titles. One of the poorly focused students from the honors class admitted that he didn't "really understand what I wrote."

While such collections of random facts or bits of literary criticism were infrequent in this class (only the papers of 3 honors students were poorly focused), it was a common problem for the students doing literary papers to be able to separate the content of an author's works from biographical facts about that author, despite their teachers warning that the author's lives weren't to be included. All but the clearly focused papers included some extraneous biographical information. However, some few of the most clearly focused were able to successfully incorporate the biographical into their thesis or focus statements, e.g. one paper discussed how Kafka's alienation and isolation influenced his works.

"You see what you want to see and you hear what you want to hear."
The Rock Man
The personal in one's point

While epistemological and developmental constraints may prevent some students from seeing knowledge as something that they can construct, others may not perceive that they are permitted or encouraged to do so. It was difficult to tell from students' comments if it was developmentally determined or a matter of permission and encouragement, but there were frequent enough expressions of discomfort that mediators should be aware of this possibility and remind students that they have this permission (if they indeed do). Some students expressed the opinion, unlike that of the Rock Man, that they were to see what they were supposed to see and hear what they were supposed to hear. Few commented on the freedom inherent in the project that was expressed so well by one of the honors students, "I love to read fiction and give my opinion on it. There can be no truly right or wrong answer . . . Cool."

Baxter Magolda found in her study of college men and women that males were more comfortable with taking a personal perspective. Although they were not necessarily more successful at focus formulation in this study, they were more comfortable talking about it. One junior boy wanted to put his "own twist" on his thesis meaning. A senior male mentioned his need to "develop my theme on what I'm researching." Another said he wanted to "create my own opinion" not "guess what the teacher wanted."

But a large group of both boys and girls expressed a strong desire for independence in their searches. These students wanted to do their projects on their own and on subjects that they choose. It is widely accepted that a developmental task of adolescence is to seek independence and autonomy, and this was evident in this group of students throughout the process.. A senior boy, for example, said that the "hardest thing for me to do concerning my paper was write what she wanted me to."

Doing research projects on individually selected topics provides an unusual opportunity for this autonomy in secondary school. A junior girl stated it well, "If someone is telling me what to do rather than me wanting to do it on my own, I'd end up doing what I want to do a lot better." Another junior girl expressed the potential inherent in the Information Search Process for an individualized and unique learning experience: "I love writing but not about someone else's thoughts about a place, person or thing. The whole idea of school should be based on teaching someone to think.."

Not all students were so confident or wanted such autonomy. An alternative "safe" approach was evidenced almost exclusively by a smaller group of girls. They expressed a concern with doing the paper correctly or by the rules. They seemed to feel that there was one RIGHT way to do this, or one RIGHT answer, and that by following some rules or meeting the teacher's expectations they could reach some certainty, as suggested when one senior said, "I like to know what I know and not to care about the rest." These students expressed a desire for frequent help and guidance in doing the paper correctly. A number of students were concerned with whether or not they should express a personal perspective, a defining concept in the Kuhlthau model. One student thought it was important to be "non-biased." One honors girl was "not sure if a research paper should have personal opinion in it or not, so I can't decide if I should do a bit more research or put some of my own ideas in it."

"He's got a point there."

Shouted from the crowd on Oblio's triumphant return from the forest.

Validation as learner

One's focus may either arrive in an "aha" moment, like when Oblio removes his hat and reveals his newly formed point, or it may evolve more slowly, usually with a lot of work and perhaps a bit of struggle. Doing these papers was difficult. It is a complex task. Even Oblio's "aha" followed a long period of wandering in the Pointless Forest. But that dramatic moment brought him confidence in his new insight.

The resultant positive affective components of successful project completion, confidence, pride, efficacy, are one point of having students do these projects in school. They are a possible but not certain outcome of the process. According to Kuhlthau, confidence comes with the clear formulation of a focus, and in her studies less focused students felt disatisfied. For many of the students in this study, that was not the case. Clearly focused students did tend to feel confident when they were finished, but not all of them. Some of even the most clearly focused continued to doubt their work and lack confidence in their abilities, even after they received what were typically A grades. Yet confidence was felt by many of the less clearly focused students, those whose product was a sequencing of information around a narrowed topic. Even these students found postitive affirmation, what one the senior English teacher called a sense of pride in ownership.

Many of her students were Tourists, those who found rather than formed a focus, but she spoke of their ownership, nonetheless, "If they read and follow the criticism, they become really proud that they can have this intellectual dialog about it. Not just the A and B students, but the ones who hang in there, go through the process and complete it." She offered the story of a student whose grade on his paper rose from failing when he rewrote it. He originally had turned in a paper that showed he hadn't really read the book, Conrad's Heart of Darkness. I worked with him, told him what he would have to read and have to do, and then watched him tackle the subject, go back and really read the work and the criticism, and turn in his OWN paper."

Another girl struggled with every stage of the process but remained attached to her topic. She said, "I'm still lost on what it is I need to do. But I am going to stay with Alice Walker. I feel straight about working on her." Her teacher said that she had thought this girl would quit, "just take the F", but again continued to work with her. Both teacher and student were pleased when she finished. In the teacher's words, "For this girl, finishing the paper was a maturing process." Another boy persisted until he "finally really got into the content of Hollow Men and liked what he did. He missed all the [assignments'] steps, but thought he was 'Mr. Intellect' from then on."

This teacher thought it was important to keep after her students, especially the ones who might get frustrated and not turn in a paper. She said, "I badger everyone until they get a paper in." Formulating a focus and finding a point in all the information encountered along the way, at whatever level, can validate these students as knowers.