Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

In this course, students will engage with the following concepts:
**Research is motivated by a need to know more on a topic.
**Not all information is good information; some good information is not pertinent information.
**Successful research is a recursive process that requires persistence, and a balance of focus and open-mindedness.
**Students engaged in research are scholars, entering into an ongoing conversation in which others’ ideas are given credit and original ideas are valued.

Upon successful completion, students should be able to:

1. Locate, evaluate and select pertinent information in order to make informed decisions based on data.
2. Evaluate sources of information to distinguish between facts and opinions in order to enter into the community of scholarship, and develop professional competence.

Students will participate in in-class or online discussions on developing a research topic, and complete a written research topic statement. Students will complete in-class or online activities including searching a variety of databases and requesting books and other materials from libraries outside of PCC. As a final project, students will create an annotated bibliography that includes citations to books, published articles and web sites. Annotations will include a sentence on the author’s authority, a summary of the information source, and 1-2 sentences on the value of the work for the student’s research project.

THEMES:
• Information
• Persistence
CONCEPTS:
• Data structure
• Economics of information
• Authority and attribution
• Academic conversation
SKILLS:
After this class, students will be able to (demonstrate the ability to):
• Articulate a research topic, and identify what information they need.
• Critically evaluate information and recognize the value of various types of information.
• Save and manage information electronically or by printing it, and to describe the purpose and parts of a citation.
• Identify a variety of sources of information, and the characteristics of the information found in them.
• Develop a search strategy based on their research topic, and search a variety of information resources effectively.
• Describe what resources (human, physical and electronic) they can expect to find in a library, and how to access those resources.