eModule 1: Introduction to the Strategies for Online Academic Research (SOAR) and Student Toolkit
Lesson 1.1 - The Nine Strategies for Online Academic Research
Objective:
In this lesson, you will learn why and how students typically struggle with online research, and you will become more familiar with the nine strategies.
An explicit and manageable process helps all students conduct better online research. The strategies were designed to give general education middle school students and students with learning difficulties a step-by-step method to search for, find, evaluate, read, and use information from online sources.
Each strategy is a purposeful and memorable step in the research process. Click on each icon to review each strategy’s key purpose:
Starting a Web Search
This strategy teaches students how to create “Google ready” search questions that will guide them to appropriate and relevant information on the Internet. The term Google ready refers to a question that (a) starts with a questioning word, (b) has been checked for spelling and grammar, and (c) includes the most specific words the student knows about the topic.
Improving a Web Search
The second strategy teaches students to refine and test a new question when search results seem poorly matched to their research topic. In this strategy, students find new, more topic-specific vocabulary in their results list and “collect” these terms by copying and pasting them into their digital notebooks. By looking carefully at the vocabulary used in a results list, students understand their topic more thoroughly and learn to identify better descriptors for searching.
Choosing Three Good Sites to Open
The third strategy teaches students how to select websites from their results list for further investigation. Videos in the Student Toolkit prompt students to (a) look at URLs in the results list to find names of people and institutions they recognize and trust; (b) identify non-commercial websites by looking at domain names; and (c) open at least three websites they believe will have appropriate, relevant, and trustworthy information.
Weighing a Website
The fourth strategy teaches students how to evaluate a website they have opened. The strategy introduces students to important page elements that help in evaluating a website. Students are taught practical techniques for navigating a website to find answers to their search questions, and they are prompted to reflect on the appropriateness of the site’s reading level for their understanding.
Finding Information in a Website
Strategy 5 teaches students how to find information embedded in a website quickly and accurately. After students determine that a website is appropriate and trustworthy, they must find the place in the website that contains the specific information they need. Students start by reviewing questions in their digital notebooks to help them focus on the topics about which they are seeking information.
Reading Online
With the sixth strategy, students are taught to use text-to-speech to enhance their comprehension of unknown words and phrases by having them spoken out loud. Students are also taught to reflect on their reading and check for understanding by asking themselves questions.
Combining Notes in an Outline
The ninth strategy helps students reorganize information into appropriate subtopics or categories. After using this strategy, students have digital outlines with clippings organized by meaningful headings. All clippings are tagged with capital letters that match tags in the reference list. Once the information has been reorganized into an outline, students can use it to complete assignments such as writing papers, preparing a presentation, or studying for a test.
Recording Notes
The seventh strategy teaches students how to “clip” information from a website and record it in their digital notebooks in a way that cites its original source. Students use this strategy when they decide that what they have read is important to save for later. Students copy and paste “clippings” from the website’s text, and “tag” the clippings so they can always find or cite the original source.
Creating Categories
The eighth strategy teaches students how to categorize information in their digital notebooks based on the meaning of the text they collected. Prior to implementing Strategy 8, information in students’ digital notebooks has been organized by URL, rather than by meaningful categories. Strategy 8 starts students on the process of creating a digital outline they will use to organize their information in relation to its significance rather than its source.
Kathleen Guinee (2004) studies the technical and cognitive skills involved in conducting research at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She found that, of the 13 activities students perform while researching, the most common are:
Construct search string
Analyze search results
Identify information
Produce output
Review Guinee's Research Process Map by clicking here.
Guinee's Process Map
Only two activities—search and visit sites—were found to be automatic steps that all students perform.
Activity 1.1 - Explore the Research Process
To give you practice reviewing and understanding the strategies in the way students traditionally do online academic research, complete a practice exercise on Guinee's research process map. In this activity, you will look at Guinee's research process map and choose which of the strategies align with a specific step on the map. Click here to complete this activity.
Guinee's Process Map
Lesson 1.2 - Instructional Elements
Objective:
In this lesson, you will learn how students navigate the Student Toolkit.
Instructions and instructional competencies have been developed to help teachers effectively teach the nine strategies to their students. Students do all of this work on a computer or tablet using the online Student Toolkit.
For example, Strategy 1 (“Starting a Web Search”) is composed of three steps:
Type
Tidy Up
Transfer
For each step of each strategy, there are four instructional elements that students use to gain competency:
Review the description and overview of the systematic research approach and the four instructional elements that students will perform while learning the strategies and conducting a research project.
Instructional Videos
Quick Tips Videos
Practice Exercises
Try It! Assignments
Instructional Videos
In each instructional video:
The teacher-avatar, Dr. Knox, describes one step of the strategy, and introduces the most important concepts, skills, and vocabulary
Computer screencast demonstrations teach this step in depth
A student-avatar applies this step to a personal research project
Students watch videos to learn the strategies; videos may preferably be accessed through the Student Toolkit individually using Vimeo or with YouTube using this
link when schools restrict access to Vimeo. If YouTube is also restricted, we can work with your school to make them accessible. Please email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., and we can send electronic copies of our videos through email or help you to resolve any issues regarding access. Also, you may project videos for students using your own computer.
Quick Tip Videos
Thirteen Quick Tip videos teach students technical and research skills to help them use the strategies more efficiently.
These videos were created in response to early implementation results showing that most middle school students were unaware of useful keyboard shortcuts, such as Copy and Paste, Find, and Bookmark.
Practice Exercises
Practice exercises quiz students about what they have learned.
After watching the video for each step of each strategy, students answer three to five questions as practice exercises. This helps them think about and remember the key concepts and skills, and cement into long-term memory what they learned.
Students receive immediate feedback and an explanation about why their responses were accurate or inaccurate.
Try It! Assignments
Try It! assignments let students apply each step to one realistic and motivating research topic.
After watching the videos and doing the practice exercises for each strategy, students complete a Try It! assignment. Students access the Internet and gain first-hand experience of the unpredictability of working on an authentic online task.
For many of the Try It! activities, students use digital notebook (such as a Google or Word document, or a classroom blogspace) to save their research work.
After students finish the Try It! assignment, they are ready for immediate formative feedback from teachers. Then, they move on to the next strategy.
In schools where teachers and students use Google documents for assignments, students can save their work in a folder shared with their teacher.
Activity 1.2 - Target Student Learning
Add a comment on the teacher forum to share how you might use this process map as a planning tool.
How could this map help you target learning growth or learning struggles that students experience during the research process?
How could it help you take action to meet students’ unique instructional needs?
Lesson 1.3 - Online Research Strategies, National Standards, and Teaching Goals
The CCSS implore students across the curriculum to value evidence. Whether offering a written, oral, or visual interpretation of a message—or providing an argument for a math solution—students in every class and discipline are expected to do research and use relevant evidence to support points and conclusions.
Valuing evidence is central to conducting research. The strategies for online research address the following overarching sixth-grade English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects standard:
W.6-8.7. Conduct short research projects to answer a question (including a self-generated question), drawing on several sources and generating additional related, focused questions that allow for multiple avenues of exploration.
Each category is aligned to one or more of the CCSS. Read the descriptions of each category and then the descriptions of the strategies. Consider the essential understandings of the CCSS that have been assigned to the three categories. As you read about the strategies, think how you can leverage the learning that is taking place in your classroom during strategy instruction to optimally meet the CCSS. Consider the question: “How will you know students have met the essential learning that is described by these CCSS?”
Activity 1.3 - Use the Strategies to Meet the CCSS
Review the Alignment of SOAR and CCSS. Post a reflection to the teacher forum about how one or more standards on this list relate to the following questions, and how the strategies may help with problems you have encountered in your classroom.
What problems have you had in helping students gain mastery of online research?
With which of the standards have you struggled most?
Instructional Videos
Quick Tips Videos
Practice Exercises
Try It! Assignments
