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As the semester draws to a close, you’ve decided to cash in your remaining goodwill with your students and assign them a research paper. Research assignments are hard work for both teachers and students. In addition to having to grade the things, you’ve got to teach your class a whole new skill set: how to research wisely and effectively. Fortunately for them, they’ve got a few more tools at their disposal than when you and I were in school. In addition to pointing these tools out, you can show your pupils how to be smart about using them.

Get to Know the Topic

Once students have a topic in mind, they should find out as much as they can on the subject. A good place to start is by doing Web searches. For a good overview of a topic, you can check out Microsoft’s Encarta, or if your school allows it, Wikipedia.

Before anyone flips out about Wikipedia, notice I said great place to start. While inaccuracies exist, Wikipedia is a great place to find basic information on just about anything. If students protest, remind your students they shouldn’t cite any encyclopedia as a source. Whether made of paper or bits of data, encyclopedias are designed to give them a broad overview of a topic. Wikipedia and Encarta are great for helping students get enough of a handle on a subject so they know what to look for when searching for more in-depth sources. Wikipedia won’t give students the definitive information they’ll need for a well-researched paper.

After your students familiarize themselves with the material, they’ll want to hit the library. Thanks to tools like WorldCat, they can develop a short list of books to look for before they even leave the house. Of course, that’s assuming they can’t find information via Google. The reliability of online sources is another issue altogether, so they might want to read our previous Instructifeature, Five Tips to Improve Students’ Information Evaluation for advice on how to tell good sources from bad.

By this point, your students should have enough information to get started. Now they must decide what to do with that information.

Be Specific

Remind your students that they can’t dump every fact they found out onto the page. Their facts must support the paper’s central idea or thesis. A paper on rain forests is way too broad, and frankly, sounds like they picked the first Wikipedia article they could find. There’s too much info, and their writing will either wander all over the place, or gloss over all the meaty stuff. The key to a good thesis is to make it as narrow and specific as possible. The WWW Research Guide says,

“Narrow your topic down to something that can be thoroughly researched in the time allowed and can receive detailed attention within the assigned length of the paper…You should be able to express your topic as a kind of discussion question, one that starts with the word ‘why.’ For example, ‘Why does Chaucer make use of the images and backgrounds of the Medieval art of memory in Book I of The House of Fame?’ Or, ‘Why is mandatory drug testing for high school athletes wrong?’”

Specificity is the difference between seeing Chicago from a plane or on the ground. The view from the air lets you see for the expanse of the city, the Sears Tower, maybe Wrigley Field if you’re lucky. But you have to actually be at the ballpark to watch the Cubs lose.

Give Credit where Credit is Due

That is, don’t plagiarize. For students new to the research game, it helps to educate them on what exactly constitutes plagiarism. This kind of cheating often occurs unintentionally. Plagiarism.org lists several examples of unintentional plagiarism, including:

1. confusion between plagiarizing and paraphrasing
2. copying from their notes, which contained both others’ ideas and their own
3. inability to find the source where they learned a particular idea
4. not knowing what constitutes “common knowledge”
5. being confused about expectations for the research assignment

This means that, as soon as you give your first research assignment, take some time to discuss plagiarism. Give them examples of what they can and can’t do, what they have to cite, and the level of analysis you expect from them.

As they say in math, show your work. If students are up-front about the sources they use, they won’t have any problems with plagiarism. So when it comes time for them to cite their sources, be sure to send them to Ottobib or Son of Citation Machine so they can attribute their sources correctly. These sites can format their citations easily, and in the correct format.

There’s lots of information available about how to research effectively. These ideas should get your students started without overwhelming them. So as your class starts on its first research assignment, this information should give them fewer things to grumble and groan about.–BILL FERRIS

Do you have research advice you’d like to share? Let us know in the comments!

Photo credit: Cayusa on flickr.