Posts Tagged ‘improving student research skills’
March 11 - Better Research Basics, One Sentence at a Time
By: Barbara Barney Nelson, PhD and Scarlet Clouse in Effective Teaching Strategies
Breathes there a professor of any subject with soul so dead who never to himself hath said, “Today’s undergraduates are hopeless at research!” (apologies to Sir Walter Scott). It is easy to blame high schools or freshman English classes, but that doesn’t fix our problem. As a frustrated educator of future teachers (Clouse) and a 20-year veteran of teaching college writing and research (Nelson), we obviously sympathize and often feel blamed. We have found that a better approach is an interdisciplinary effort that gives students ample opportunities to practice and develop their writing and research skills. The cumulative effect of this approach not only benefits faculty, but our students seem to appreciate and feel less intimidated working within this method as well.
September 18 - Teaching Research and Writing Skills: Not Just for Introductory Courses
By: Kevin Brown, PhD in Teaching and Learning
Most professors want students to know how to research and write in their fields. In fact, many degree programs now have introductory courses for majors with content that addresses these research and writing basics. However, the assumption that students learn everything they need in one course is a faulty one. All of us who teach courses for majors need to regularly revisit this content if students are to develop these research and writing abilities. Let me be specific and suggest six things professors can do that help students improve in both areas.
July 16 - I Don’t Have Time to Teach That: The Benefits of Faculty-Librarian Collaborations
By: Andrea Gillaspy-Steinhilper in Instructional Design
Community College instructors have a great deal to teach: study skills, a college orientation to education, and the actual course information for their discipline. They also know that their students must be information literate, must know how to find supplementary information for each course, how to use information effectively, and how to credit their sources appropriately. In this regard, Washington State Community and Technical Colleges have been working under an LSTA grant on Information Literacy from 2008-2012 (Washington). Lower Columbia College libraries have been using the grant to integrate librarians or library tutorials into face-to-face and online classes, thereby offering information literacy instruction to students without increasing the teaching load of the discipline instructors. When incorporated with research assignments, this instruction, along with embedded librarians, facilitates both student learning and faculty grading of assignments.
October 17 - For Better Research Assignments, Ask a Librarian
By: Beth Schuck in Instructional Design
A recent survey of faculty handouts for research assignments found that most of the handouts provided details for length, citation guide style and how to get assistance from the faculty member. What wasn’t included was a critical need for most undergraduate students: context for the research topic.
June 29 - Alternative Writing Assignments: The Integrated Paper
By: Genevieve Pinto Zipp in Teaching and Learning
As faculty working with students to explore topics of interests we frequently request that they review the literature to gain an understanding of what is known and unknown about a topic and then present their findings in an integrated manner. While many students are familiar with developing papers termed “literature reviews” or “reviews of the literature,” these types of papers frequently do not afford the students the opportunity to integrate what has been found. Thus faculty have begun to require that students present their findings and thoughts via what is known as an “integrated paper format.”
January 17 - The Lost Art of Note Taking When Writing a Research Paper
By: Matt Birkenhauer in Teaching and Learning
When students write essays requiring research, in the age of Wikipedia and other online resources, I worry a little, not so much about the quality of the sources themselves (that has always varied, even in the day of hardcopy sources), but about the quality or outright dearth of note taking that often accompanies the writing of research papers.
January 11 - Student Writing: Avoiding the Blank Screen Blues
By: Kari Benson, PhD in Effective Teaching Strategies
Staring at a blank screen the night before the research paper was due—this was the dilemma faced by my upper-level science students. The paper, the product of their independent research projects, is an important part of our curriculum and one component of our assessment of their scientific writing skills.
May 26 - Wikipedia in the Classroom: Tips for Effective Use
By: John Orlando, PhD in Effective Teaching Strategies, Teaching with Technology
Most academics consider Wikipedia the enemy and so forbid their students from using Wikipedia for research. But here’s a secret that they don’t want you to know—we all use Wikipedia, including those academics.
September 17 - Providing Feedback in a Technology-Mediated Environment
By: Mary Bart in Online Seminars
This seminar will give you valuable insights and techniques for using technology to communicate concise feedback to students about their writing, encourage them to take responsibility for their growth as writers, and strengthen teacher-student rapport to better support and facilitate learning.
May 5 - Partnering with Your Librarian to Promote Information Literacy
By: Marilyn Steinberg and Kari Mofford in Effective Teaching Strategies
Librarians as partners is a relationship that may not have occurred to you, but as librarians we think it’s one you ought to explore. Librarians are qualified to help you with pedagogical issues that go way beyond how to find a book or search a database.
