Most high school teachers  don’t assign “serious research papers” to their students, writes Will Fitzhugh, now a Concord Review blogger, on The Answer Sheet.

. . . teachers do not have the time (or perhaps the knowledge) to guide students through them and to assess them when they are handed in.

. . . as long as educators do not see that writing serious term papers will lead to more knowledge, which leads students to read better and understand more, such papers will continue to receive the small notice they now do.

In a Chronicle of Higher Education poll a few years ago, 89% of college professors said their students were not very well prepared in reading, doing research, and writing, Fitzhugh notes.

Also on The Answer Sheet, 17-year-old Christiane Henrich, a Marblehead High senior, writes about writing her first research paper.

Before crafting my research paper on U.S. Civil War Medicine, I had never composed a piece of non-fiction literature beyond six or seven pages. Twenty pages seemed to be an unconquerable length.

Her paper was published in The Concord Review, a quarterly academic journal for high school history research.