In the first-year composition research class, a disproportionate pedagogical focus is placed on the use of the library, rather than on the more difficult and integral problems of how to read, interpret, and analyze information the library offers, how to translate and synthesize this into knowledge, and how to produce a research product worthy of the genre. Certainly, use of the library is an important skill for students to master, but when this retrieval skill consumes the lion's share of a research course, attention to the more scholarly practices that students must master to successfully negotiate their academic careers inevitably suffers. If, then, the goal is to produce competent student-researchers, there is a need for strategies that mitigate the complexity of the research process. There is also a need for strategies that help students to act more expert through the learning process than they really are, that enable them to more fully experience the culmination of the research process: the pride and pleasure of seeing themselves as genuine researchers. Therefore, in this paper, the author focuses on the embedded tasks of information retrieval that consume so much of the energy and time of those in the research composition course. The author argues that a combination of pedagogical reflexivity, presorted information, and Internet-connected classrooms or labs can function as a scaffold to support these tasks. The author calls this scaffold the information-retrieval scaffold (IRS), and she maintains that IRS allows teachers to refocus their pedagogy more effectively, which thus enables students to act more expert, and in so doing transforms their learning potential as competent and productive researchers.