This research came about after reviewing over a thousand annotated bibliographies during more than two decades of combined experience in higher education at the doctoral level. As dissertation chairs and residency faculty it became apparent to that doctoral learners consistently missed the connection between the common descriptive annotated bibliography and their potential research. We noticed that annotations rarely reflected doctoral scholarship or the ability to read empirical research critically. This disconnection seemed to result from the lack of clear expectations, in the form of curriculum instructions and faculty interaction, for the preparation of annotated bibliography assignments.
We provided an empirical basis for including the key elements of empirical study, within the annotations, to help students compile structured or unstructured data needed for their research. We find that these key points, and potentially others, provide the students entrusted to us with a useful framework to begin to read scholarly sources critically, as a scholar, a learner, and a developer of new knowledge, rather than as a consumer of knowledge. Without a clear framework, students seem to continue to read as they have always read.
As doctoral faculty, we cannot expect students to think and write critically unless they first learn to read critically. Our experience in two years of encouraging this critical reading framework in our content courses, in our mentoring as dissertation chairs, and in our service as residency faculty has been that students seem to be better prepared to read critically, think critically, and ultimately write critically through annotations more relevant to their proposed research. Our research indicates that students are crafting better reviews of the literature and providing improved substantiation for their assertions.