eModule 2: Student Outlines - Teaching with the End Goal in Mind

Objective:

• In this lesson, you will learn what to expect from a student outline, the final product that incorporates all nine strategies. You will view examples of student outlines demonstrating different levels of mastery of online research.

Teaching with the end goal in mind allows you to evaluate your students’ progress as they learn the strategies. You can give instruction and practical feedback to support students in creating a quality product.

Students create digital notebooks as they gather information online using the nine strategies, and they end up with an outline. Review four examples of outlines showing different levels of student mastery of the strategies. Later, you will learn how to score these four outlines using standardized rubrics.

The digital notebook is the place for student inquiry, thinking, brainstorming, reflecting, taking notes, collecting clippings of text, and synthesizing information from disparate online sources. This digital notebook is central to each strategy and essential to the whole research process. However, because it is important to honor your content expertise and instructional freedom in creative unit planning, the strategies stop at the initial outline process. This outline can be used as the basis for work toward a more final formal outline or research product. The online research process can be applied to any creative assignment that you have designed—a position paper, science exhibit, presentation, debate speech, poster, or brochure. In general, students are more thoughtful and creative when asked to perform research that serves a purpose or product they can call their own.

Watch the SOAR Digital Notebook Presentation and think about these questions:

• How can digital notebooks help students who struggle with organizing information?
• What advantages do digital notebooks have compared to paper-based notebooks?

Student outlines are scored using a standardized rubric that shows where students are in the research process. The scoring rubrics are based on the principle that students become more aware of their own abilities, and more independent and motivated to learn, as they gain practice, skill, and knowledge. Students move through four levels toward mastery as they increasingly take control of their learning. These levels are based on Rosenberg’s (2012) mastery level definitions. Read about each level.

• Novice
• Competent
• Experienced
• Master

For more information on Rosenberg’s Levels of Mastery, view Building Skills in Online Research.

Separate rubrics for scoring student outlines are available for teachers and students. The Teacher Scoring Rubric gives teachers a quick and effective formative evaluation tool; the Student Scoring Rubric is easy to read, and promotes self- and peer assessment.

Post a brief comment on the teacher forum about your reactions to the student examples of four different levels of mastery. What skills would help students gain higher levels of mastery?

Objective:

• In this lesson, you will learn the importance of developing successful questions for the Google search engine—from your students’ perspective, completing the steps they will do.

Now that you know what students’ final products look like, it is time to learn the process that takes them there. This course arranges the nine strategies into three groups: strategies for finding and selecting sources (1-4), strategies for reading and recording information (5-7), and strategies for organizing and using information (8-9).

The first four strategies focus on locating appropriate and relevant information on the Internet, which is aligned to CCSS ELA-Literacy W/HST.6-8.8. Strategies 1 (“Starting a Web Search”) and 2 (“Improving a Web Search”) help students form and refine specific Google-ready research questions. The questions that students brainstorm and investigate serve to frame and guide all of their research activities.

Students struggle with finding, remembering, and arranging the vocabulary necessary to compose precise, search-engine-friendly questions. This complicated task can be simplified by using the computer as a cognitive partner and creating a digital notebook to organize information.

As you learn the strategies, feel free to use the “Zoos are good for the planet: Agree or disagree” topic supplied by the Student Toolkit  website in the Strategy 1 – Try It! assignment. You may also use research topics that fit with your own curriculum goals. When students learn these strategies for the first time, it is best to have all using the same research topic. This facilitates student learning and collaboration as well as grading of student assignments.

Strategy 1 (“Starting a Web Search”) teaches students how to create good search questions to guide them to appropriate and relevant information on the Internet. Students begin by opening a digital notebook (or, electronic word-processing document), and then brainstorming questions, phrases, and vocabulary words about their research topics. To succeed in using this strategy, it is important to teach students how to:

• Use an electronic word processor
• Brainstorm (write down ideas in the digital notebook)
• Construct a question that is “Google-ready,” meaning 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

Students often struggle with brainstorming. The research topic may be unfamiliar, or perhaps it is the student’s first encounter with thinking critically and creatively about a new topic. Encourage students to write down all they know about the topic, including any key words they can think of or opinions they have. Teachers can give a brief overview of the topic before students form their own questions.

Strategy 2 (“Improving a Web Search”) teaches students to refine and test a new question when search results seem poorly matched to their research topic. Students learn to look through their search results to identify which may be useful and relevant. Students must understand:

• What a results list is (a list of results from the Web browser the student receives after searching research question online)
• How to use copy and paste keyboard commands

Explore Strategies 1 and 2 in the Student Toolkit  as a learner. Watch all videos, do the practice exercises, and complete the Try It! assignments using a research topic you might assign to your students. As you go through Strategy 1, note what you would do in your classroom to teach this strategy. Which concepts would you pre-teach? What do you believe students will struggle with the most? How would you help students if they struggle? Post your notes and completed Try It! assignments to the teacher forum.

Use the Quick Tips Videos Checklist to quickly access and preview each instructional video. After you have reviewed the 12 videos, put a check mark next to each technical skill you have covered in the checklist.

Objective:

• In this lesson, you will learn, from the perspective of your students, how to choose reliable websites from search results.

When teaching Strategy 3 (“Choosing Three Good Sites to Open”), you may emphasize the Quick Tips videos so that students can refine their choices using the find command or gain better vocabulary, key ideas, and sites by looking at a Wikipedia entry on the research topic. Teachers are encouraged to spend extra time instructing students in how to use wiki sites for academic research, especially according to the school’s curriculum standards or policies.

Strategy 4 (“Weighing a Website”) is the most difficult evaluation skill for students to acquire, and is worth concerted focus. In recent surveys—Pew Research (2012) and Easybib Survey (2014) —teachers and librarians agreed strongly that students lacked critical evaluation skills. More than 90% of students use the Google search engine for school assignments, but the librarians surveyed responded that only 2% could skillfully evaluate a website’s credibility. Most teachers in the Pew Research surveys rated students as “poor to fair” when it came to “using multiple sources effectively to support an argument, assessing the quality and accuracy of information they find online, and recognizing bias in online content.” Deliberately teaching students to recognize and avoid bias, and providing them with ample opportunities to practice evaluating for bias, are essential to successful Internet research and will serve your students for years to come.

• Review the Teacher Scoring Rubric and Student Scoring Rubric, and then watch the videos, do the practice exercises, and perform the Try It! exercises for Strategies 3 and 4 in the Student Toolkit, as if you were a student.
• To help students understand and recognize biased information, what websites will you use as exemplars to demonstrate legitimate informative websites—and what websites will you use to demonstrate biased information that should not be trusted? Upload your answers to the teacher forum, including the website URLs you chose.

Click to view eModule 3: Framing a Unit.