All Teaching Materials

How to use JSTOR, a large collection of scholarly (peer-reviewed) articles strongest in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Students often struggle most with finding relevant sources on their topic because they are entering entire sentences into a database or are using terms that don’t match how authors would describe their topic. The purpose of this activity is to give students experience brainstorming keywords for a particular topic. It also helps to demonstrate that the initial terms they come up with to describe their topic may not necessarily be the terms authors will use to write about the topic.

Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) can help students to create a better-targeted search. This activity helps students understand what each Boolean operator does in a visual way.

Describes the characteristics of different types of sources to help students figure out how to select a source.