Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes . . .

A Letter to Parents

As parents you may have noticed some changes in the type of research challenges we are presenting to students and the expectations we have of their research products.  So, what’s going on? 

The big picture:

Information has never been more available. Students must now evaluate information in ways never required of us when we were in school.  The journal articles and books we spent hours finding, were pre-filtered for quality by editors and publishers and selected by librarians.  Now the acts of locating and accessing information are turbo-charged and, because the Web is a self-publishing medium, the evaluation process is squarely in the hands of students.  The Web affords students a great deal of independence, often removing adult consultation from the research process.  Developmentally, students may be unaware of the “research holes” in their projects; they may not distinguish sources of high quality from those of dubious value. Their facility with word processing and their ability to manipulate digital content may tempt them to produce cut and paste efforts.

The response:

We are in the midst of a whole-school initiative focused on student research, specifically linked to Springfield’s Language Arts Standard 8, the national standards for information literacy, and directly concerned with enhancing student learning and achievement.

As a faculty, we are teaching students to discern and use resources of high quality both online and off.  We expect balance in student source lists.  For some topics it makes sense to use the free Web exclusively.  For most, it does not.  I estimate that a whopping 90% of the books on our library shelves are not on the “free web.”  You’ll notice I am careful to label the part of the Web that most students access through standard search engines as “the free web.” Beyond this relatively small part of the web, our students have access to a wealth of full-text books, journal and newspaper articles, documents, and broadcast transcripts through online subscription services that we promote when they visit with their classes and make available to them at home through passwords. 

As a faculty, we also expect students to engage in thoughtful research based on inquiry.  You are not likely to see your students engaged in topical research. Topical projects like the country, the state, the planet, or the element report are not likely to be ingested into a student's system. Instead you are likely to see your students asked to develop essential questions—questions that inspire them to compare, analyze, debate, evaluate, judge, predict, construct, or propose a solution.  (Instead of write a report about a disease, students will likely be asked to defend which major disease is most worthy of research funding.) Often we will ask students to develop a thoughtful thesis--a clear, specific assertion relating to the assigned topic that the student will support with strong evidence.  To succeed in this task, the student writer’s voice must be heard through his or her analysis.  Cut and paste efforts are unlikely to make the grade. (For more information about our thesis expectations see thesis.html.)

Research projects are not mere busy work.  In addition to training students to be effective writers, the research process trains students for adult problem solving and decision-making.  It prepares students for the world of academics and the world of work and helps students prepare to answer such questions as:

• Which car should I buy and how much should I pay?

• Which candidate will best represent my interests?

• How can I convince my boss to accept my proposal? Who should I believe?

What's a parent to do?

You can help us address our research standard initiative, by helping your student create quality research products and encouraging your student to reflect on his or her work.  Please:

• Ask your student if he or she has used subscription databases in his/her research. Make sure your student has a password list. (The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and our own school pays for the premium channels, it would be a waste to watch basic cable all day.) Students who rely on the free Web only ignore such wonderful databases as EBSCOHost, GaleNet, AP Photo Archive, SIRS, Facts.com, with their high quality book, magazine, newspaper and reference article content. Most of these databases are available from our library Catalogs and Databases page.

• Ask to help as your student brainstorms potential research questions and thesis statements.  If your student needs to develop a working thesis, can it pass the five tests?

• Does it inspire a reasonable reader to ask, "How?" or Why?"
• Would a reasonable reader respond with "Duh!" or "So what?" or "Gee, no kidding!" or "Who cares?"
• Does it include general phrasing and/or sweeping words such as "all" or "none" or "every"?
• Does it lead the reader toward the topic sentences (the subtopics needed to prove the thesis)?
• Can the thesis be adequately developed in the required length of the paper or project?

• Ask to check students’ works cited and works consulted pages for balance and quality.  Have they used the Web exclusively?  Have they ignored books?  Of the websites they have cited, how many appear to have been produced by universities, museums, and recognizable organizations?  Do any of them have suspicious domain names, like Geocities?  Good researchers search for credibility, authority, accuracy, relevance. Good searchers are fussy!

• Look for “research holes.” Quite simply, kids don’t know what they don’t know. Though the Web gives them great independence, they may not recognize the best words to use in a search and they may not recognize the best documents in a result list when they see them. However clever they are, in your travels as an adult, you are likely to know things a fifteen-year-old does not.  Encourage your student to research with “peripheral vision,” to be on the lookout for these related terms, names, and organizations.  In a subscription database that means using the controlled language, or thesaurus, to find the appropriate subject headings.  In a search engine, that means browsing through annotations for additional vocabulary or making use of features like “more like this” and “similar pages” when they appear near really good results.  Suggest names or events or keywords worth searching that might not necessarily be in your student’s realm of knowledge.  If you suspect important content has been overlooked, it is likely the teacher will too.

• Is your student in a search engine rut?  Is he or she relying on a certain "fictional butler" way too much? All search boxes are not the same.  Students have a wide variety of search options: search engines; a growing number of smarter search engines (Clusty, A9. LII, and many more); specialized search engines (like Scirus, for science); subject directories--for the one-concept search or when they want to get to the good stuff quickly; and high-quality subscription databases. Remind students of their many search tools choices listed on the Virtual Library.

• Did your students document all non-original ideas--quoted, paraphrased or summarized?  For further information on how to responsibly borrow the ideas of others visit sumparquo.html Our MLA Style Sheet is available at: mla.html

• If you proofread your students’ work, can you hear their own voice—their own original thought and analysis--among the quotes? 

·   Does your student need to put the laptop down and get a lift to a library? It’s not all on the Web. Don’t allow your students to ignore the value of books and other print content. A two-page printout cannot compete with in-depth biography, scholarly nonfiction, or contemporaneous reporting of the history of the last few decades produced BDE (Before the Era of Digitization).

Visit the Virtual Library at http://www.sdst.org/shs/library/

Visit our Online Research Guide at: http://www.springfield.k12.pa.us/rguide/

You can find an assortment of student handouts, organizers, and rubrics at: jvles.html

And, if you’d like further information or support, please feel free to phone me in the library—215-233-6030 Ext. 2502, or email me at joyce_valenza@sdst.org

                                                                                                                                                            Joyce Valenza

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