Editor's Note: Experts are constantly telling teachers that they need to integrate technology more effectively into instruction. But teachers themselves—drawing on their understanding of their students, their curriculum, and good pedagogy—are the ones who need to make decisions about how to use technology in their own classrooms.
That's why we're delighted to welcome a new columnist, Catlin Tucker, who is both a master teacher and a leader in technology integration. Catlin teaches 9th and 10th grade English language arts at Windsor High School in Sonoma County, California. She is a presenter, professional developer, and the author of numerous books and articles on technology use in education. In this column, Catlin will share practical, replicable strategies she uses in her classroom to harness the power of technology for meaningful learning.
Each year when I take students into the computer lab for the first time, I'm amazed by how little they know about research. They don't know how to articulate a research question. They don't know how to complete a well-executed search. And they don't know how to evaluate the credibility of online resources. This boils down to students with limitless information at their fingertips but no way to sift through or make sense of it all. That's both scary and wasteful.
The language of the Common Core State Standards makes it clear that asking questions to fuel research is crucial to college and career readiness. The word research appears 80 times in the English language arts section of the standards.
In the elementary grades, the teacher typically determines the questions that students will research. As students progress through school, the responsibility of developing research questions shifts from the teacher to the students. By 8th grade, students are expected to "conduct short research projects to answer a question (including a self-generated question)."
I'm not surprised that the Common Core standards wait until 8th grade to begin requiring students to articulate their own research questions. Developing a complex question is challenging, so it makes sense that students would need to build up to this higher-level task. Asking good questions is a hard skill to master. But it's absolutely necessary to lifelong learning.
Diving Below the Surface
My 9th grade students and I spend time talking about the difference between on-the-surface questions and below-the-surface questions. I love the way students describe these different types of questions. Students will often explain that on-the-surface questions are "basic," "have one right answer," and "are used when you don't understand something." Under-the-surface questions, in contrast, are "complex," "can be answered in different ways," and "are used to find out how people think or feel about complex topics."
Before we dive into a large-scale research project centered on a complex question of their own design, I get my students accustomed to asking under-the-surface questions by requiring them to write a strong discussion question each night. On a Google Form that I created and embedded in my class website, students fill in their name, class period, e-mail, and one dynamic, complex question that could fuel a discussion or research assignment. They can ask a question about the text we're reading or about an issue related to the text.
The goal is to get students so comfortable asking higher-level questions that they do it almost by reflex. Once they're confident asking under-the-surface questions, we can apply that skill to research.
Developing Search Skills
The beauty of a student-designed research question is that it will lead to a more meaningful research project because students are able to focus on a topic that interests them. Any time teachers give students the autonomy to make choices and steer their own learning, the learning becomes more relevant.
Once students feel confident writing research questions, we dive into what I call Research Reboot. I want to retrain students who have poor research habits so they know how to find information quickly and effectively. We discuss tips and tricks for searching online. Most of my students begin their searches at Google's homepage, but very few know how to narrow their search with a variety of simple strategies. To help them become savvy online researchers who know their way around a search engine, I share tips like these:
- Limit searches to a specific domain using "site:" plus domain (for example, site:.edu or site:.org).
- Eliminate a word or website from your search using a hyphen directly in front on the word or URL (for example, -en.wikipedia.org).
- Find related pages using "related:" plus URL (for example, related:scientificamerican.com).
Students also need to know what questions to ask to evaluate the credibility of an online resource once they find it. At the start of the year, we talk at length about website credibility. I don't want my students to assume that everything they read online is true; I want them to think critically about the information that pops up in a search. However, most of my incoming 9th grade students have no idea what questions to ask to evaluate whether a site is credible.
Three years ago, I designed a "Got Credibility?" Google Form that students must complete for each online resource they want to reference in a research paper, infographic, or project. I want to train their brains to ask the right questions when assessing online sources. The form asks them questions like these:
- Is there an author? Does the author have education, experience, or expertise in the field he or she is providing information about?
- Is the author or website associated with an institution, organization, or company? Could that association create a bias?
- Is the information current? Is that important given the topic?
- Does this resource have a "works cited" section or list of references that are credible?
When I first ask students to complete this form, I typically hear a barrage of complaints: "Mrs. Tucker, how am I supposed to know if the author has education, experience, or expertise on this topic?" "Mrs. Tucker, I've never even heard of this company, so how do I know if there is a bias?" "Mrs. Tucker, this takes forever!" I always respond the same way: "Have you asked a classmate for help?" "Have you done a search to find out more about that person or company?" Students begin to realize that I'm not going to give them any answers. Instead, I simply present more questions. They'll remember much more if they've had to struggle a little to find the answers.
Putting Questions to Work
Last year, we embarked on a Challenge-Based Learning Project, a collaborative, hands-on multidisciplinary project that encourages students to research a real-world problem and use the technology at their disposal to design a solution. The teacher presents a theme or big idea, and then students identify the specific challenge they want to tackle.
The overarching theme for our project was sustainability, and students had to articulate a specific driving question that was dynamic enough to fuel ongoing research. Students generated a wide range of questions about issues related to both social and environmental sustainability. I was amazed by the variety of questions. How does water pollution in California affect human and animal health? How does bullying at a young age affect a person mentally and emotionally? How can the United States effectively regulate helium depletion?
As I read through my students' work, I realized they truly had learned how to ask complex questions. These dynamic questions fueled two months of research and collaboration. It was rewarding to see how the work we had put into learning how to articulate a strong question, search online for credible sources, and think critically about that information was now bearing fruit in a student-driven project.
At the end of this project, as students presented their findings and shared their action plans for change, I was amazed to find that I was learning an incredible amount. The flow of teaching and learning had shifted. Students were no longer just consumers of information; they were also generators of information—because they had learned how to ask good questions.
