Introduction

 

This research unit introduces you to the academic component of subject matter learning.

 

---

High school history students often experience the discipline of history as interesting facts that lead to a single truth (Russel&Yanez, 2004), history as fact telling.  The high school student may construct the history research genre as pure fact-telling, in which case she will cite specific concrete facts. One of the problems with this approach is that students re-represent ideas they have found as their own, perhaps citing statistics or concrete details, but omitting to acknowledge that the argument is originally set in a scholarly context.. For example, a student writing on the history of women in Canada would establish a chronology of events and people—specific suffragettes, restrictions on education, and perhaps their impact on the largely male role of politics, education, or religion.

 

In the case of women's rights, the underlying assumptions may, for example, be the relationship between individualism and equality. In university, students are expected to evaluate established knowledge, with the possibility that that knowledge is incomplete, contradictory, or even wrong. A crucial problem in writing research is that non-specialists (i.e., high school students) must use specialized discourses (Russel&Yanez, 2003).  Part of the high school students’ assignment will be to find sources that are serious enough, yet accessible to a high school level, and the school library must provide the intelligence necessary for performing this task. 

 

---

 

From a master plan to a final draft

                                      -- How to break projects into bite-sized pieces.

 

• secrets to successful surfing online
• how to identify and source reliable research sites
• best bets for fact gathering
• most importantly, evaluating and organizing all that information

 

 

Task (facts to find)

---

 

 

 

The use of documents to create research papers requires students to access and select multiple sources, integrate points from a range of documents, and interpret and manipulate information as an author

 

 

Professional historians critically examine and interpret (and reinterpret) primary documents according to the methods (rules, norms) of history. Sources could include: newspapers, private and public correspondence, speeches or writings of the individual concerned, the records of institutions (educational, legal, religious, or political). A newspaper article will often lack historical consciousness, and lack a good deal of less-obvious facts about a given event. This doesn't invalidate a newspaper article as a source, but it does place limitations on what it can be used for. A newspaper article could provide some factual information about an event itself, but it is always interpreted through the lens of a historian aware of its limitations.

 

 

Newspapers and magazines are easily accessible to students as they are basically a printed version of informal talk. They involve generally familiar or immediate matters, and do not involve much explanation or proof. Because of the structure of this information, public information is often charged with distortion. Academic writing, in contrast, moves from general assertions to specific evidence and continues back and forth.

 

 

 

 

 

Organizing Exposition

 

Without abstract language, it would be impossible for a historian to make generalizations about human experience which has been drawn together and interpreted in these terms. Your teacher wants you to present historical research on women's rights in Canada. To do this, you will need to research the following topical abstractions:

• democratic modernity

• New government

• individualism (equality=right to vote); local context (civil rights, individual rights)

 

These ideas, while essential to organizing your writing according to the assumptions and objectives of knowledge in your classroom, do not translate well into keyword searches in databases. Our first step will be to understand how keywords function in the research process, and how to formulate keywords that correlate to your research questions.

 

Students writing history papers need to be able to re-represent points and arguments already established by professional historians. A student researching in history needs a nuanced understanding of state, nation, and independence and how these assumptions govern historical perspective. 

 

The documents students locate as source texts will reflect a variety of genres such as editorials, popular historical information, news stories, photographs, political commentary or speeches, book reviews, or scholarly articles. The format of the genre tells you about the differences between different kinds of texts, but it is the situation that informs which texts can be meaningfully used to talk about an issue.  An editorial, while offering a distinct point of view, nonetheless is written to have an immediate impact—often emotional. A columnist does not offer an in-depth analysis of an issue, and it may be difficult to bring such a popular voice into a scholarly discussion. 

 

Skills/ Important To Know and Do (The concepts, facts, methods, processes we want students to master that leads to enduring understanding.)

 

 

Identifying subjects and keywords

 

Using OPAC

 

Identifying, locating and using print materials

 

Browsing skills

 

Online database searching skills

 

Internet searching skills

 

Citing sources

 

Evaluating resources (especially websites) for reliability and usefulness

 

 

Process

---

 

 

Document-based Question

 

~generating terms as a conceptual bridge

 

 

 Evaluating Sources

---

 

 

 

The accessing and evaluating of relevant information has become a primary goal of information skills instruction. A problem often presented is that students lack discernment and use low quality web-site sources for their research papers, and school and academic librarians have been given the job of addressing this deficit. With the explosion of online publishing, students themselves are publishing informational websites often under the umbrella of an academic course. This compounds the problem of finding good sources and discriminating amongst them. Students do not believe that everything on the web is true; however, they do have difficulties ascertaining the purpose of the university, and how knowledge has been constructed and generated through a peer-based process of shared disciplinary understandings (Meola 2002).

 

 

Content is often transferred from one medium to another and students are not always expected to take the goals and objectives of the disciplines. This method may not equip the writer with means to cope with multiple outside sources of information. 

 

 

 

‘Telling’ what one document says and then the next, and so on is not a pertinent feature of academic research genres. Writing from inside a discipline requires an understanding of the assumptions of knowledge within resources. Problem definition and what counts as evidence are part of the adjudication of disputes and the forging of communal values. These concepts are used to strategically shape and interpret texts and are essential to a definition of the research process.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Argument- specific historical circumstances

 

Skills- using bibliographies to identify authors

        - using citation skills to identify the ideas of an author

 

 

Preparation for university requires writing that is able to reproduce different stances on an issue through the citation of established ideas. Writing from inside a discipline requires an understanding of the assumptions of knowledge within resources. Complexity, qualifications, and concessions are part of the construction of meaning. Prior speakers are respected and authors are committed to particular stances and roles. These features are embedded within domains of inquiry, deliberation, and controversy. 

---

 

 

 

Process (what you need to do)

---

Searching in Cyberspace: Using search engines

 

Your teacher knows that you are new to this job, and he wants your research experience to be successful. He has asked you to follow these steps:

 

 

I. Locating Sources

The design of an information retrieval plan must be situated in the goals and objectives of the course of study

 

economic basis of war