The hidden curriculum is created by the environment in which you are located and instills you with the norms and values of your academic culture. Think about it: admitting incompetence is a loss of face and undermines your academic authority with your peers. Hence the fear of admitting you might not really know how to search the literature thoroughly or efficiently [emphasis is not mine].
People who think this way will never amount to anything because their field of vision will forever be limited by the psychological problems they keep mistaking for objective reality. I’m telling everybody in sight how I made an ass of myself recently because I had no idea how to write abstracts. And it doesn’t occur to me to fret about loss of face and undermining of authority.
And then these loss-of-face people come into the classroom and start projecting their battle for respect with the inner censor onto the students.
Clarissa's Blog 
Doesn’t asking for help make you look better, because it means you’re willing to improve?
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I agree. People respond very well to honesty and requests for help.
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And if they don’t, then they are the ones who look bad or insecure or whatever, not the honest asker..
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And if they don’t respond well, they make themselves look mean or stupid or whatever, not the honest asker!
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I followed the link and read the entire post. I found the whole thing quite odd. I do agree that “hidden norms” exist in academia and that for first generation college students in particular, understanding these norms might be challenging. But I think these norms are primarily social and have to do with “intangibles”: dress, voice volume, hand gestures etc. In other words, things that are truly hard to “learn.”
But, again going back to the OP, in what world are basic research skills a part of a “hidden curriculum” of a PhD student? 85% of a PhD students job is research. It’s very explicitly the focus of the curriculum.
Further, independent learning is an important part of the PhD experience. If a beginning PhD student discoverers that /she is lacking some basic skill somewhere (as I did) then it’s on the student to discover how to fulfill that lack. We are talking about graduate students here: people who have bachelor’s degrees and who were presumably successful as undergraduates. Not 18 year old freshman. There are plenty of training modules in order to learn how to conduct initial research. If a student lacks the initiative in order to discover how to get up to speed in a basic skill, then perhaps graduate school is the wrong place for him/her.
And finally: the advice offered was quite bad. The blog post points graduate students towards Google Scholar as an acceptable research database! Not even my undergraduate students turn to Google Scholar for their projects. Google Scholar certainly has a place in the research world and I’m glad it exists. But every field has it’s own databases that are much more complete than Google Scholar. So if a struggling grad student found their way to that blog post, s/he will receive bad advice to boot.
Moral of the story? Google is great. But it’s not appropriate for academic research. If any struggling grad students are reading this, please leave Google and go directly to your university library. 🙂
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