The Introduction highlighted one of the most perplexing issues facing an educator who is intent on promoting the independent learning of Sixth Formers, namely how to provide the best support to students at the point where they are looking to produce a lengthy and cohesive essay involving information from a multiplicity of sources. The heart of the problem lies in the fact that a task of this complexity requires the application of thinking characteristic of Piaget's formal operations stage of development and, as Kuhlthau (1988, 55) points out, some individuals are unable to work at this level even during their high school years. Chiappetta (1976, 253) goes even further, maintaining that research ‘shows that most adolescents and young adults in the United States have not attained the stage of formal operational thinking’. Fourie and Kruger (1995, 237) are more sceptical still. Drawing on the work of Wadsworth, they comment that even grown-ups cannot be assumed to have mastered ‘all the possibilities of formal operations’. Given this disconcerting developmental picture, we should not be surprised when, after hoping that learners will assemble ideas from different sources within the same paragraph of their document in order to provide illumination on the matter in question from various perspectives, all too often they present material from separate places in discrete paragraphs and there is no real integration of content. The challenge is greatest when the learner must distinguish between many related and intricate arguments and then make comparisons in their document; forming a narrative from facts obtained from different sources usually proves easier.

If we shift our attention away from stages of development to hierarchies of individual abilities, again there is evidence to suggest that students will struggle to unite, in a single document, material from an assortment of sources. The skill is consistent with the ‘relational’ element that forms the penultimate level (in ascending order of difficulty) of the five within the SOLO Taxonomy postulated by Biggs and Collis (1982). Essentially, the young people are being asked to synthesise – a skill that Krathwohl (2002, 215), in his revision of Bloom's Taxonomy, ranks above all others in terms of complexity.