Developing Research Skills

2020 Guide To Teach Students How To Research & Avoid Fake News, Disinformation, And Misinformation

9-12 Video

Based on my popular presentation titled "Teaching Students To Become Expert Researchers And Avoid Fake News, Disinformation, and Misinformation" this video will provide you with the resources needed to teach your students everything they need to know to become efficient and effective researchers. This video uses a fun and humorous approach to help students understand…  learn more

50 Mini-Lessons For Teaching Students Research Skills

1-3 4-5 6-8 9-12 Lesson Plan

This post outlines 50 ideas for activities that could be done in just a few minutes (or stretched out to a longer lesson if you have the time!). You’ll find a PDF summary below too! This post shares ideas for mini-lessons that could be carried out in the classroom throughout the year to help build students’…  learn more

Big6

Big6 is a six-stage model to integrate information search and use skills along with technology tools into a systematic process to find, use, apply, and evaluate information for specific needs and tasks. The steps include... Task Definition Information Seeking Strategies Locate Information and Access Use of Information Synthesis Evaluation Big6 provides a wide variety of…  learn more

Conducting Research

With so many information sources now at our fingertips, knowing where to start, sorting through it all and finding what we want can be overwhelming! Perdue's Online Writing Lab (OWL) looks at how to integrate primary source methods, such as interviews and observations, with secondary source methods, such as books, journals, and the Internet. It…  learn more

Earth Sciences & Map Library

The Earth Sciences & Map Library at U.C. Berkeley is sufficiently comprehensive that is can be used as a test-bed for secondary students to learn research skills. This library contains inventories for national wetlands, earthquake, climate, and weather. It features special projects such as terrain modeling and simulations, a research ship for drilling experiments (drilling…  learn more

Education World: Evaluating Web Sites Lesson Plan

6-8 Lesson Plan

Brief Description Students learn the six criteria for evaluating Web sites and then use those criteria to locate three sites that provide good information and three that do not. Objectives Students will Understand the six criteria for evaluating Web sites Identify Web sites with accurate, relevant, and current information on a given topic Keywords Internet research, Web site evaluation, information literacy  learn more

English Worksheets Land: Research Skills Worksheets

PreK 1-3 4-5 6-8 9-12

Researching skills are now more needed than ever with all the media that we constantly and involuntarily taking in. What is real and what is fake? If you can use your skills to find out the truth, you will be in high demand in the future. These worksheets will help develop those research skills for all your students.  learn more

Learning to research on the Web

Librarians have a weird sense of humor. This was the old joke: "The internet is like a library with no catalog where all the books get up and move themselves every night." It has now been replaced with: "The internet is like a library with a thousand catalogs, none of which contains all the books…  learn more

Media Literacy Resources for Making Sense of the News

9-12 Lesson Plan

On November 8, 2022, people across the country voted in the nation’s midterm elections. Facing History has created a collection of short, easily digestible resources to help teachers and their students enhance their media literacy skills. Three of these resources will help teachers, and those in their networks, make sense of the news in the days following the election. Read: How…  learn more

Teaching Students How To Research

6-8 9-12 Video

This video uses a fun and humorous approach to help students understand how to use keywords to make better search queries, provides several tips and examples taken directly from Google, covers how to use filters, introduction to Google News and Google Scholar, and how to mine Wikipedia for legitimate and reliable resources.  The EdTech Show…  learn more

The Avalon Project

The Avalon Project at Yale houses a huge databank of documents relevant to the fields of law, history, economics, politics, diplomacy and government. The collection is organized by topic and time period. One use of a site like this is to have students select a document and explain it. Another is a creating a webquest…  learn more

The Paraffin Paradox

Video

Steve Long looks at the Paraffin Paradox. Steve shows how to hide a sheet of aluminum foil between two blocks of paraffin, then uses it to teach how to make observations and do good scientific work. Students are not allowed to break open or otherwise damage the item. Why is the top half always brighter…  learn more

The Question is the Answer

From Now On's "The Question is the Answer" page tells you how to create a Questioning ToolKit to encourage student questioning and research. Quite good.  learn more

USA Facts

USAFacts provides a data-driven portrait of the American population, US governments’ finances, and governments’ impact on society. We are a nonpartisan, not-for-profit civic initiative without a political agenda. We provide vital spending, revenue, demographic, and performance information as a free public service and are committed to maintaining and expanding our available data in the future.  learn more