Working with first-year students at Purdue University, the author, a composition instructor, joined efforts with librarian Alexius Smith-Macklin to explore the efficacy of a collaborative approach to freshman writing instruction at the university level. Combining expertise from the Purdue programs of English education, theory and cultural studies, rhetoric and composition, and library studies, they initiated an action research investigation of curriculum designed to improve the research skills of first-year university writers. It was their purpose to tackle the challenge of defining a teachable process for directed, undergraduate student research in a culture networked and authorized by information technologies, to discover how instruction might better be structured to effect improved skills in critical thinking, information retrieval, data analysis, and subsequent student research and writing. This paper reports the process and preliminary findings of a work-in-progress, addressing first a brief introduction to action research methodology and situating this study as one of many arising from a gathering of experts who share in common a concern for student proficiency in information literacy. (Contains 10 notes.)