Helping Students Understand Annotated Bibliographies--Amy Bolick

In the studio this fall, I’ve been working primarily as an embedded tutor with an ENC 1101 class made up of 50% INTO students. The students in this class have been a pleasure to work with, and the experience has helped me grow as an instructor. It’s been great to spend such a large block of one-on-one time with writers who are working on the same projects that my own students are writing. This helps me to better identify the gaps in student understanding, and to refine ways of explaining important concepts. I am then able to apply this insight in my own classroom.

One of the most significant trends I noticed is students’ difficulty with the concept of an annotated bibliography. I had many embedded tutoring sessions where students would bring rough drafts of their annotated bibliography, and ask me when they were going to “Write the paper.” They could not understand that the annotated bibliography was the entire project. Additionally, I found that many students were intimidated and lacked confidence, simply because they were unfamiliar with the term annotated bibliography.

A large population of studio clients are freshman composition students, every last one of whom must produce an annotated bibliography. To help them navigate this assignment, I decided to make a worksheet for the writing studio that would briefly summarize its purpose and layout. The worksheet explains the purpose of an annotated bibliography, the format, the information that should be included, etc. This information will help students to better understand the significance of the assignment they are completing.

I am a firm believer that students perform better on assignments when they can see the value in them. The worksheet that I created for the annotated bibliography presents the assignment as a valuable research tool that can be helpful with any class for any paper. My goal is for students to not just produce an annotated bibliography, but to understand how this exercise can help them for the rest of their college careers. 

By Amy Bolick, MA Rhetoric and Composition