Teaching Research Skills

A recent post on the TES forum asked about how best to teach research skills, so I em...researched online and found the following:

Teach-nology provides this page on which resources are best for researching particular topics. It could easily be adapted to be more relevant to your learners' cultural situation.

The All about Explorers site contains fictional biographies with differentiated lesson plans to lead learners to an appreciation of why being discerning about Internet resources is so important.

Bibliobouts is an online game that teachers can customise for assignments.

Students are rewarded for their research skills and their ability to differentiate between good and bad material. To play, they find sources, which are judged by their peers for relevance and credibility, and then measure the worth of sources their classmates find. They gain more points the more sources they assess accurately and the better their own sources are judged.

-The Chronicle of Higher Education

Bibliobouts works with Zotero which is a free tool for collecting and citing sources. It works from your browser and is an interesting alternative to other bibliography tools.

The British Library has a section dedicated to creative research with guidance for learner, teachers and a great set of links to even more helpful websites.

The 50-word assignment idea from Charles L Cohen of Wisconsin University is designed to improve writing, as well as research, skills. Following the links to the examples and explanations clarifies how it works and can be adapted for high-school groups.




Update (03.02.11): The Learning Network has just published a lesson plan on the reliability of sources which may also be of interest. Click here.

As always, feel free to add your own resources and reviews in the comments box below.