GEN: Research should be hard

[Deborah Stafford <Deborah_Stafford@COMPUSERVE.COM>]

I have been thinking about the recent thread concerning the statement tha=
t
"research should be hard" and questioning the use of pre selected materia=
ls
and pathfinders. The discussion did make me reconsidersome of my practice=
s.
On Friday,  while working with a class of 9th graders it still seems to m=
e
that my approach is mostly correct.. We were working on  an  Endangered
species project.  At the end of the project they will have to convice the=

teacher to save their animal since we do not have resources to save all o=
f
the animals. Out of the 15 we are studying, we can only save 5. They have=

to show the cost of saving that species over the cost of not saving that
species.

Pre selecting books -- Rather than sending all 30 students to the OPAC,
their all finding the same call numbers and going to the same two shelves=

isn't very productive. It doesn't teach the search skill except to the
first two students who find the section. Pulling the books and doing a bo=
ok
talk on the resources is more effective. I often do "book talks" to a cla=
ss
in to do research. Book Talking reinforces use of table of contents, inde=
x,
reliability and the fact that the basics are already there for them. Yes,=

they should know this, but they often don't.

Path Finders -- For the second phase, we (teacher and I) introduced use o=
f
an online science resource. We talked about searching by name of their
species, scientific name, common name and alternate names. We reguired th=
em
to prove to use that none of these terms worked. If they could prove it t=
o
us, they then could go and search DogPile (this teacher's favorite). We
only had one who was unsuccessful with the online database. This product
also give students suggested websites. They found that usually they were
led to the same two websites which turned out to be very good ones.

I believe that in this case they really worked harder and smarter. I don'=
t
feel that we made it easy for them, but we did "scaffold" for them. Later=

in the year I will remind myself to not give them as much "scaffolding".

Deborah J. Stafford
Gen. H.H. Arnold High School
Wiesbaden Germany
now proudly on the web at http://www.wies-hs.eu.odedodea.edu
Deborah_Stafford@compuserve.com

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