Research

March 18, 2013

When I mentioned to Shawn that I really wanted to incorporate some more student interaction into my practicum experience she was immediately responsive and invited me to join her in meeting with the senior students as they did research on their inquiry projects.  This ongoing Senior Language Arts project is set to culminate with a term paper in just a few weeks.  While most of the seniors have much of their research and reading under their belts already, we were invited up to the classroom to do a check in with them on their resources for any part that they had yet to complete. 

When we arrived in Ms. Sokolo's classroom the students were getting some papers back and making a transition to working on their inquiry projects.  Ms. Sokolo did a great job of offering students a visual organizer for their progress on this journey.  Each student could clearly see what the expectations were and what was missing as they moved forward in their inquiry process.  Several students seemed to be missing one or two of the essays required.  Once I understood the parameters that the teacher wanted us to take into consideration (ie: an academic, popular or newspaper article on their topic), we went to assist students with finding these sources.

We used the EBSCO databases through the library website to access the articles.  Many of the topics seemed to fit well into the Psychology and Social Sciences databases.  So, we looked up topics.  As I did the searching, I talked through my process and asked the students questions.  What are you looking for?  What kind of information do you think you need to support your thesis?  What kind of perspective would be useful?  Together we came up with some search terms.  As we narrowed down the articles, I would point out the useful selection tools.  Our conversations went like this: "wow, 2,000 results, that seems high.  How can we narrow this down?  What if we look for just peer reviewed articles in journals.  Okay, great now its just 200.  Now what if we narrowed it to just the most recent results, like since 2010.  OKay, great!  10 results, that will make it much easier to sort."

The students were incredibly patient with me and they were very open to my suggestions.  I think we found some good things and I really enjoyed hearing about their inquiry projects.  Doing this kind of work will be so important for helping them to feel prepared for this kind of requirement when they reach college.  I hope they will remember how to do their own research--and most of all I hope they remember to go to the library and ask a librarian if they ever need help!