A growing number of high school students are looking for opportunities to do academic research, hoping to add ‘published author’ to their list of achievements when they apply to colleges.

Just look on popular Facebook groups and Reddit threads for tips on getting into selective colleges, and you’ll likely find posts recommending that students participate in intensive research or compete in science competitions as a way to stand out on college applications. It seems that many aspiring applicants and their parents have fixed on the idea that getting research published in an academic journal as a high school student has arisen as a new trophy to strive for in an escalating race to try to stand out as an applicant, especially after more selective colleges have dropped requiring the SAT or other admissions tests.

But experts say that the trend of high school research, while well-intentioned, has plenty of pitfalls. After all, academic research often requires deeper knowledge of a field than is typical in high school, and it involves carefully following ethical guidelines to protect research subjects from potential harm that students may not be aware of without expert guidance.

“A piece of research, even a basic piece of research, can take years to produce,” says Bob Malkin, the executive director at the International Research Institutes of North Carolina. “High school students have classes they need to worry about. They may be playing sports. They might be pursuing other hobbies or interests. So mixing this in with all the other things they need to do can definitely be a bad idea, just because it takes so much time.”

Pushing students to get involved in research early can also amplify inequities among those who don’t have access to expensive research programs or opportunities at elite institutions. That’s because many students can’t afford to participate in summer programs to hone research skills, or they aren’t taught important research skills in high school, says Bethany Usher, the provost and senior vice president of academic affairs at Radford University. As a result, they don’t have the same experiences that will help them find a job in a lab or conduct their own project when they get to college freshman year, she says.

That’s not to say that teaching research skills in high school is bad, though. In fact, Malkin recently co-wrote a book about how to help young students along the path, called “A Guide to Academic Research for High School Students.”

The hope, experts say, is that teaching research skills becomes a more mainstream affair, making its way into high schools and undergraduate courses outside of elite private schools. That could help build basic skills without chasing publication at too young an age.

Building Skills

Bonnie Hale, an independent counselor advising high school students on their college applications, says that she sees students whose attempts to do research to enhance their resume does them more harm than good.

One student, for instance, asked Hale to help her send out a survey to parents across California, a task that would’ve required the oversight of an institutional review board.

Other students will try to submit their work for publication without the proper elements of an academic paper, such as a background literature review or a methods section. One student hoped to submit a paper that didn’t even include a research question, Hale says. No peer reviewed journal would publish this work, she adds.

"Students may not have seen themselves as being interested in doing something like that, but if they're taught inquiry and research opportunities in high schools, that doesn't require a university to be nearby."

— Bethany Usher, provost and senior vice president of academic affairs at Radford University.

Some journals cater toward research from high schoolers, but they often require high fees, are run by other high school or undergraduate students or aren’t reputable journals, Hale says. Plus, publishing in these journals likely won’t impress college admissions officials, she adds. For students looking to get research published, Malkin suggests they work with a college faculty member, though that can be difficult to pull off.

Publishing research without proper mentorship or oversight can also have major consequences for the student, says Hale, who co-wrote the book on student research with Malkin. She’s worked with some students who say they participated in a study, only for Hale to find out they overstated their role in the paper. If students get caught conducting research unethically or mis-representing themselves on an application, a college could rescind its offer or put that student on probation, she says.

“That’s what students don’t understand,” Hale says. “That the pressure makes them go in a direction that they ought not to go.”

To Hale and Malkin, improving the environment starts with changing parent attitudes. Parents need to lower the pressure and understand that their child will learn and be happy in college even if they don’t get into their dream school, Malkin says. If they’re interested in research, encourage them, but if they’re not, don’t force it, he says. “Somehow somebody's got to convince these parents that your kid's going to be okay,” he adds.

Usher, of Radford, says more high schools around the country should also help teach research skills — without pushing too hard too soon. She says high school teachers could encourage their students to participate in community-based projects, for example, such as surveys or other outreach in their local area. Often the skills young students learn through doing research, like critical thinking, are what help them later on rather than the research itself, she says.

“If we want to reach a greater majority of students, being able to have those teachers well-equipped to be taking advantage of research opportunities from communities and making them relevant to students” is essential, Usher says.

Early exposure to core research skills could also help with college readiness and retention, she adds. “Students may not have seen themselves as being interested in doing something like that, but if they're taught inquiry and research opportunities in high schools, that doesn't require a university to be nearby,” she adds.

Some colleges have also begun incorporating research skills into courses. Throughout a student’s time in college, classes will continue to build on those skills, which students can use when they enter the workforce or graduate school, says Lindsay Currie, executive officer for the Council on Undergraduate Research.

Most graduate programs now require some level of research, Malkin says, and students need to start as early as possible. Working research into classes encourages students to sign up for additional opportunities outside of the classroom once they build their confidence in the subject, Currie adds.

“If you just have a flyer that says, ‘hey, do you want to participate in my lab,’ you might not, as a college freshman, really understand what that means if you don't have any context for it,” she says. These courses “make it so students understand the value and can test out whether it's the right fit for them.”

In one biology class at Radford, students conducted research on a specific fungus among bees. After a semester of trapping bees and testing them using various methods, the students presented their original findings at a research fair. These types of projects can be conducted in any type of course, says Usher, who was the previous president of the Council on Undergraduate Research. She suggests that students could each choreograph their own routines in a dance class rather than just all learning the same steps.

“They don't have to step out of their comfort zone, everybody's going to class so there's not a ‘you get selected for a thing’” type of process, Usher says. “Sometimes students do research and they don't even know they've done it,” she adds “You need to be like, ‘this thing that you thought was really cool and exciting, that was research.’”

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Writing centers on college campuses have been around for more than 100 years, and they’re both a resource for students doing assignments and a symbol of the importance in higher education of learning to express yourself in text.

But as generative AI tools like ChatGPT sweep into mainstream business tools, promising to draft properly-formatted text from simple prompts and the click of a button, new questions are rising about what role writing centers should play — or whether they will be needed in the future.

Many writing centers are already jumping in to experiment with new AI tools, making the case both for the continued importance of writing instruction and for their place on campus as a hub for teaching AI literacy.

“I see this as a real opportunity for writing centers to show leadership if they're given an opportunity,” says Sherry Wynn Perdue, president of the International Writing Centers Association. “It's an important moment, and our role as leaders is to help provide resources for our colleagues so that we can be leaders in the conversation about generative AI.”

Some writing instructors worry, though, that the new tools may tempt colleges to rely too heavily on the technology or even eliminate writing centers entirely. Writing centers are often run by non-tenured staff, which can make them especially vulnerable, says Genie N. Giaimo, director of Middlebury University's writing center and an assistant professor of writing and rhetoric there. And in the past, administrators at some colleges have replaced their services with all-encompassing tutoring centers or third party organizations, Wynn Perdue adds.

"Writing doesn’t have that much meaning without a human audience. Meeting with someone as you are developing your ideas is often the place where you feel that there’s the most meaning in what you’re doing.”

— Anna Mills, an English instructor at the College of Marin

And even some professors with doctoral degrees in English are wondering whether colleges need to do as much these days to teach the skill of writing in light of new AI tools. “Why do we need a required writing course if AI can do everything outside stakeholders want such a course to teach?,” asked Melissa Nicolas, a professor of English at Washington State University, in an op-ed last year.

So where does AI leave the writing center?

Finding a Balance

Writing centers need to find a balance between introducing AI into the writing process and keeping the human support that every writer needs, argues Anna Mills, an English instructor at the College of Marin.

AI can serve as a supplement to a human tutor, Mills says. She encourages her students to use MyEssayFeedback, an AI tool that critiques the organization of an essay, the quality of evidence a student has included to support their thesis or the tone of the writing. Such tools can also evaluate research questions or review a student's writing based on the rubric for the assignment, she says.

By modeling these uses of AI, Mills says, writing centers can increase students’ understanding of the technology and ease their worries about using it inappropriately. Many students arrive at college concerned that they’ll be accused of cheating if they use AI for anything, she says. For instance, many have seen the video on TikTok of a student who says she was given an F on a paper for using a grammar checker that set off an AI detection system her professors used. Providing guidance can help students feel more comfortable with the technology, she says. And understanding that AI’s suggestions can be wrong also boosts student confidence in their own abilities.

“The student could say, once they get the feedback, ‘No, that's not really what I want to do. Could you help me think about how to expand this other part of it?’” Mills says. “That's something that I think we need to be cultivating — that kind of confidence and willingness to engage and push back — because that is how you get the most out of AI.”

Still, Mills requires her students to go to the writing center at least four times during the semester. Human interaction is essential to the writing process, she argues. Often the tutors energize students and show a genuine interest in what they are writing, something they can’t get from any chatbot, Mills says.

“Writing doesn’t have that much meaning without a human audience,” Mills says. “Meeting with someone as you are developing your ideas is often the place where you feel that there’s the most meaning in what you’re doing.”

Writing centers can play a pivotal role in retention for a college, says Giaimo. The resources can be especially important for students who historically haven’t gotten as much support from colleges, such as first-generation students and those from marginalized communities, she adds. And working with a tutor could be the first one-on-one teaching interaction a student has at college, which is vital, especially for students coming out of the pandemic.

Even as the use of AI tools grows in the business world, students still need to learn how to write and organize their ideas, Giaimo says. And without proper guidance, students can end up leaning too heavily on tools like ChatGPT without ever picking up the underlying skills to put their own thoughts down on paper.

“We forget that most people who are in these processes, at least in higher education, they're just kind of starting out or learning,” Giaimo says. “The process part is important, and actually maybe even more important than what the final end product looks like.”

Promoting AI Literacy

Writing center tutors play an essential role in helping students understand how to use AI appropriately, says Sarah Z. Johnson, director of Madison College’s writing center. Many writing centers these days train tutors in AI literacy, which the tutors can then pass down to the students they work with as the opportunity arises.

Johnson and her team train their tutors to teach students about how AI can be useful in the writing process. For instance, if a student is struggling to organize an essay, a tutor might ask the student to paste their draft into a chatbot and ask it to create an outline for them, Johnson says. The student can see where a paragraph or sentence may work better in the paper and save time during the tutoring session, she says.

This year, tutors will also learn a list of AI literacies, such as how large language models work, issues with generative AI, such as their cultural biases, or how to write prompts that can help organize information, Johnson says.

At Middlebury, tutors are also trained to navigate AI policies, which can differ among instructors, Giaimo says. Tutors also learn to speak with students who they find have used AI inappropriately — say, by having a chatbot do too much of an assignment without attribution — and guide them in a more productive direction.

In that way, Johnson says, tutors can help writers think through the “implications” of using AI, so they can make their own decisions about questions like “Does this final product represent me? Does it represent my voice? Does it represent what I want to say?”

The most important thing, says Johsnon, is “realizing that gen AI is a tool, but you have to know how to use it rather than it using you.”

Writing centers often have relationships with departments across campus, which makes them an excellent place to promote AI literacy, Johnson says. Students may be coming with an assignment from an engineering class or a social sciences class, she says, which means writing center staff can build connections with colleagues across the college.

To prevent colleges from replacing writing centers with AI, directors and staff need to be proactive and advocate for the role they play in promoting AI literacy, she says. Johnson and Wynn Perdue helped craft a list of AI literacies that will be released later this year by a joint task force between the Modern Language Association and the Conference on College Composition and Communication. The IWCA also has its own generative AI taskforce, which Johnson and Wynn Perdue both sit on, that plans to create additional resources to help writing centers adjust and train their staff.

“Gen AI is not something that we're scared of, but it is something that absolutely needs to have parameters,” Johnson says. “If we're not helping students figure out what those parameters are through tutors and things like that, I just don't know how it's going to happen.”

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Colleges are adjusting to a lingering impact of COVID-19 shutdowns that kept kids out of physical schools at key points in their social development: It’s harder than it used to be to teach students to adjust to college life when so many are coming to campuses nervous about making social connections.

As a result, many colleges and universities are rethinking their freshman orientation programs, adding new options and doing more to help students forge relationships.

At the University of Colorado at Boulder this summer, for instance, administrators are offering incoming students three orientation options to choose from. One effort lets new students meet classmates in breakout Zoom calls. Another program brings students and families to campus for a day to learn about university traditions and how to get involved on campus. And those looking for an immersive experience can attend ‘Camp Chip’ — they’ll spend two nights on campus connecting with other students, getting to know the campus and seeing what life will be like in college.

Before the pandemic, the university’s summer orientation had been mostly online, with an in person “welcome week” before classes began. But these days there’s a greater interest (and expectation) from students and families in the need to help students feel like they belong on campus, says Joe Thomas, president of Association for Orientation, Transition and Retention in Higher Education, known as NODA.

“In 2019, I probably would have heard from parents and students, ‘It's annoying,’ ‘It's hard to get here,’ ‘How could you possibly require this in-person orientation?” he says. “Now they're like, ‘Oh we get it, we would really love to be there and watch our student get to know other folks.’ There's just more buy-in now.”

Colleges have another reason to try to get orientation right: It’s the first step to building belonging and, hopefully, convincing students to stay. That’s especially important for first-generation students and those transferring from other colleges.

“It is truly the kickoff to retention,” says Katie Murray, director of new student and family programs at Towson University. “If a student has a bad experience that starts at orientation and it continues through their first semester, we are less likely to retain that student.”

Flexibility Is Key

Many institutions are still in the process of “throwing darts at a dartboard” to see what sticks best for orientation, says Thomas, of NODA. This means they need to be adaptable, and offer a range of ways students can prepare to enter college.

Most colleges now have some online component to their orientation process that’s left over from the pandemic, Thomas says. Often the online portions are more “transactional,” he notes. Students learn about registering for classes, connect with their academic advisor and go through required trainings. The number of topics these trainings cover has increased as colleges feel pressure to better regulate artificial intelligence, create stricter free speech regulations or enforce hazing regulations, among other changes.

"It is truly the kickoff to retention. ... If a student has a bad experience that starts at orientation and it continues through their first semester, we are less likely to retain that student.”

—Katie Murray, director of new student and family programs at Towson University.

As a result, orientations are required to cover much more information now than even a few years ago, says Jenny Osborn, associate director of the first year experience at The Ohio State University. In Ohio, for example, state lawmakers passed anti-hazing legislation in 2021 that requires colleges to create an educational program on hazing that students can complete during orientation.

Once students have finished the online portion, colleges bring them into in-person or virtual sessions either during the summer or right before classes start to help students connect with one another.

At Towson University, for instance, students must complete a series of online modules, which typically take a total of about 35 minutes, before they come to orientation, Murray says. Then, they attend a one-day session in the summer, which can be in person or virtual, followed by a four-day program before the first day of classes.

The goal, Murray adds, is to spread information out over time, while also encouraging students to connect with one another.

“We know that sense of belonging ebbs and flows throughout a student's experience,” Murray says. “But if we can start off on the right note, that information piece can happen in a bunch of different ways.”

Creating a range of orientation options also helps colleges assess what students need, says Thomas, who is also the associate vice chancellor for student affairs at Boulder. Much of Boulder’s student population comes from out of state, he says, which makes it difficult to visit the city, where summer is one of the peak tourist times. If students can’t come to Colorado but still want to connect with future classmates, they can attend a virtual session, where they’ll be split into breakout rooms led by orientation leaders.

“We're hyper aware of making sure that our orientation programs are accessible to students, whether you have the financial means or not,” Thomas says. “We're gonna use that information to then say, ‘Ok, [for] future summers, here's what we need to be the balance to meet our first generation students with what they need, what any of our marginalized populations may need that may be different, and the population en masse for our 7,000 plus students at CU Boulder.’”

Changing Social Skills

Colleges have also begun adapting their orientation programs to the ways students’ social skills have changed coming out of the pandemic.

Many students now have a harder time saying goodbye to their families, Osborn says. Before the pandemic, about 70 to 80 percent of students would stay in residence halls during the university’s overnight summer orientation. Now more than half of the students opt to stay with their parents in a hotel. Students also usually turn to their siblings or parents for information about college rather than relying on orientation, she adds.

When it comes to choosing a date for orientation, students used to go for the earliest possible dates. Now, they want to try to coordinate with a future roommate or classmate they met online, Osborn says.

“What we're seeing student-behavior-wise at orientation is a real sense of clinging to safety,” she says.

To help students feel more comfortable meeting other students, Ohio State has begun offering more small-group and “low- risk” activities, Osborn says. Rather than hosting a large scavenger hunt, for example, Osborn says students can do jewelry making, coloring, board games and pick-up volleyball or basketball games. That way, students can connect with one or two people rather than be overwhelmed by a large group.

Other colleges have created small group atmospheres that bring students together based on similar interests or identities. This gives them a leg up when they meet each other because they already have something in common, says Gregory Wolcott, the associate vice president for student success at San Jose State University.

During San Jose State’s two-night orientation, students are split into groups of about 20 based on what they’re studying, Wolcott says. Orientation leaders host interactive activities with their groups.

CU Boulder also splits students up based on commonalities. During the university’s fall welcome program, orientation leaders host about 40 “Buff Meet Ups” for students who all have shared interests, such as gaming or music. The “meet-ups” could also be taking a tour of local restaurants or going on a hike together, which helps them connect in a smaller setting, says Lizzie Brister, director of new student and family programs at Boulder. Some of the events are also identity based, such as one for Latinx students.

Coming out of the pandemic, “there was an indication that [students] wanted to be together, they wanted to do stuff in community, but didn't know how to engage or interact with each other,” Thomas says. “Orientation programs are shifting more toward that — getting to know each other again, which is the classic thing that we try to do, but it can't just be in solely one program type.”

Orientation offices have also changed the way they train their student leaders, often to account for the same issues the pandemic has caused for incoming students.

These days many students are reluctant to sign up as orientation leaders, Osborn says. In the same way that new students don’t want to stay in the dorms, families would rather have their older students spend time at home than stay on campus during the summer, she says.

They’re also coming in with less background knowledge, Brister says. Before the pandemic, orientation leaders typically held leadership positions in high school, as a club president, for example, Brister says. Now students are coming in with less experience public speaking or facilitating a small group. Some also haven’t ever experienced an in-person orientation, but now need to lead most of the activities for the incoming class (though that has become less of an issue as students who experienced the pandemic in college graduate).

Journey leaders, as CU’s orientation leaders are called, now attend an eight-week leadership course to prepare them for orientation. They learn how to run orientation events, leadership skills and ways to engage students who may be more socially anxious, among other things, Brister says. Before the pandemic, that information was all squeezed into just four days of training.

“That's pivotal to build our culture for those student leaders of how we want to share what it means to be a Buff, how we want to present the university and be ambassadors for the university to these new students and why we’re doing what we’re doing,” Brister says. “That's been huge in building that culture for our student leaders and then hopefully communicating that to our whole incoming student population.”

And with high college costs, it’s more important than ever for colleges to offer supports and to make sure students and families know where to find that help, says Wolcott, of San Jose State.

If colleges don’t provide all the support orientation programs need, students may end up transferring to somewhere that does.

“College campuses need to understand that it's a competitive market,” Wolcott says. “If you're not rolling out the red carpet, if everyone's not on board with ‘this is orientation season and it's everybody's job,’ then campuses are really gonna struggle.”

© Photo courtesy of University of Colorado at Boulder