In-class activities

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.

A brief survey (roughly three or four multiple choice questions) assesses level of knowledge and skills relevant to a subject or course. Based on survey results, the instructor can determine an appropriate starting point for a lesson and build upon students’ prior knowledge.

PDF includes cards for teacher to cut out and organize into a deck. Each deck should include one formative process, along with six different types of information. Decks are then distributed to small groups of students with instructions to discuss and arrange the six types of information by whatever the process card says. So, for example, “rank these cards by which format involves the least amount of research up to the one which involves the most.” Afterwards, each group should state their ranking to the full class and explain why they decided to order things the way they did. Hopefully doing so will spark a discussion of how different processes contribute to the “value” of information in different contexts, and how there is no one “correct” order.

Students are provided with four abstracts from the Academic Search Premier database, and prompted to read the abstracts, consider the audience, the date, and then rank these in order of usefulness for an essay. Three sets of results lists given.