Teaching students to research is a key part of Common Core requirements, but finding answers also can keep students interested in learning.
Which would win a survival showdown: the tarantula or the jellyfish? That was the question Theresa Thompson posed to her fourth-grade class last fall. Thompson, who will be a library media specialist at Eastside Elementary School in Rogers this fall, and a co-teacher walked students through a list of facts.
At A Glance
Search it Out
Teachers and parents can use safe search sites for students to help them research. Some sites listed here filter out inappropriate material, while other search sites help students find more authoritative sources.
• www.education.iseek.com offers editor-reviewed searches
• www.sweetsearch.com offers searches pre-evaluated for safety
• www.googlejunior.com uses Google Safe Search to filter out negative content
• www.kidrex.org/ uses Google SafeSearch technology, parents can request to have offending pages removed from a search
• www.noodletools.com/noodlequest walks students through a process to define what they are searching for and then gives search tips
• www.Thinktank.4teachers.org is designed to help students find tops and subtopics for their reports
Source: Staff Report
Tarantulas, students decided, have better survivability because of their habitat, but jellyfish have more food options. The two tied, and students had to come up with three reasons why they voted for their animal. It wasn’t important which animal the students chose, but that they could back up their reasoning for why it was better, Thompson said.
Students ranked class research as their favorite in an end-of-school survey.
“Kids are curious by nature. If you just give them a ‘what if’ or a ‘maybe’ they’re going to want to find out,” Thompson said.
She knows she is doing her job when a student finds a fact she overlooked, Thompson said.
“That’s when I know it’s working,” she said.
Research isn’t about a big stack of books piled on a table anymore, said Joey Gall, a Rogers technology curriculum specialist.
The encyclopedias she points teachers to are online and use search engine features to find information. She encourages teachers to think of ways to create student projects with technology and get away from hand-drawn charts. Students can make an online book, slide show, trading cards or print out and fold cubes with a different fact on each side, Gall said.
Common Core has thrown emphasis on research, Gall said. She is creating grade level lists for teachers on ways they can incorporate technology research from curriculum goals. In kindergarten this could be a group chart about farm animal needs or the life cycle of a butterfly or frog. By third grade, the students will take their own notes on sea creatures or researching fables and myths. In fifth grade, students write research papers.
Research in elementary grades is not new, but requiring critical thinking from students is.
“The big paradigm shift there is having them come up with the question,” Gall said.
Teachers learned about critical thinking during a Bentonville professional development in June, said Judy Marquess, the district’s director of instruction and education technology. The power of research lies in not only finding answers, but in students knowing what they have learned and how they learned it, she said. Students need to be safe online, but watching them make learning their own is exciting.
Springdale prekindergarten students did reports last year on favorite animals, said Kathy Morledge, Springdale assistant superintendent for teaching and learning in grades prekindergarten through seventh. Students did their research on an iPad in the classroom and made models or posters to demonstrate what they learned.
Springdale administrators are focusing on “authentic literacy” where students can read, write, speak and listen, Morledge said.
Amber Shreve, a second-grade teacher at Eastside in Rogers, researched animals with her students last year. Informative and explanatory writing are part of the class goals. The challenge is getting students to read all parts of the textbook. Sometimes they ignore captions or highlighted text in their quest to read all the words.
“You have to teach them to use all of that,” Shreve said.
Students get excited about their research and can find it hard to narrow down their topic, said Scott Bader, fourth-grade teacher at Bellview Elementary School in Rogers
“They always think (so) big picture it’s hard for them to focus,” Bader said.
The greatest challenge for teachers and students is their greatest tool, said Jenny Gammill, Fayetteville director of K-12 science and instructional technology.
“In the last few years we’ve really entered this age of Google research,” Gammill said. Students type in their question and take the first answer as fact.
“What we have to teach kids now is what is good information, what is information that can be utilized and what is bad information,” Gammill said.
In Fayetteville that means instructional technology coaches and library media specialists work with teachers and students.
Poor research habits learned early are hard to break, Gammill said. While a teacher may pick the website in early grades, students have to learn to use the Web and to cite their sources properly.
“That is the tool. There is no other tool to research. It’s the Internet,” Gammill said.