Teaching Students How To Research
It is very easy for our students to plagiarise from the Internet. It doesn’t require much thinking or time. Copying and pasting has never been easier. However, students learn very little from doing this. The whole idea and meaning of researching is lost.
Teaching students to research, find relevant facts and then change that into their own words can be a tricky skill for some. Despite the difficulty, keep persisting with your students.
Firstly students must find and use safe and trustworthy websites. That includes checking the source and the date published. Students must consider whether it is providing facts or made-up stories.
Students should pay attention to a website address. If it ends in;
.edu it is educational - this can be anything from serious research to less reliable student pages
.gov is government-related - usually pretty reliable facts
.com it is commercial - that may be trying to sell a product
.org is from an organisation - non-profit institutions support certain causes. Could be biased
.net is network - may provide services to commercial or individual customers.
There are many good websites to direct your students to rather than them googling everything. Try using;
Teaching students note-taking skills, and being able to find the main message or key points from the text is critical. This is one of the first steps to turning their research into their own work. I recommend working through examples together as a class before students go away to work in small groups which then leads to individual research. Brainstorms are great, mind maps, tables, informative text proformas, dot points. Even using post-it notes for students to take notes is great as they are small it forces them to just write keywords.
Questions students should ask when they are putting their research into their own words.
Do you understand the content-specific vocabulary?
Would they use those words?
What words can you swap out?
How can you rearrange that sentence and put it in your own words?
What are the key takeaways from that paragraph/video?
Do I need to change any measurements e.g. miles to the Australian metric system?
When students are searching on Google they should try to be as specific as they can to be able to find accurate information. Google is great but can bring up thousands of recommended sites, making them less productive as they trudge through sites. Using specific keywords helps to narrow it down. Google also offers a challenge each day called A Google A Day where students can practice their research skills and gain points in the quickest time. Some googling tips;
if you write define: and your word it will give you the meaning
If you type intitle and what you are looking for it will bring up articles with those words in the title of the webpage
use filetype: to find a specific type of file e.g. PDF, doc
quotation marks can also be used as it just searches for the exact match to what you have typed
Teachers should also be recommending that students use child-friendly search engines such as Kid Cyber or others listed on my blog post here, which is all about keeping our kids safe online. We want our students to find facts that are true and supported.
If students are using images in their research projects they should check they have permission to use them. A couple of good sites that offer free images are;
How do you encourage your students to research and feed it back in their own words? We would love it if you joined the conversation and left a comment below.
