Points of Departure encourages a return to empirical research about writing, presenting a wealth of transparent, reproducible studies of student sources. The volume shows how to develop methods for coding and characterizing student texts, their choice of source material, and the resources used to teach information literacy. In so doing, the volume advances our understanding of how students actually write.

The contributors offer methodologies, techniques, and suggestions for research that move beyond decontextualized guides to grapple with the messiness of research-in-process, as...