Category: Teaching Source Use

• The brief Thomson Handbook by David Blakesley & Jeffrey L. Hoogeveen

• Part 3: Conducting Research. Some highlights:
  • “Conducting Research in the Disciplines” (p. 109-127) gives extended examples of research in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.
  • Chapter 10, “Online Research,” explains how search engines work and summarizes features of popular search engines. It also covers evaluating online sources.
  • Chapter 12, “Using Sources Ethically,” offers strategies for summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting source material and discusses when you might use each strategy.
• Parts 4 and 5 cover specific documentation styles, including MLA, APA, CMS, CSE, and CGOS.

• The Academic Writer by Lisa Ede
  • Chapter 6: Doing Research: Joining the Scholarly Conversation. Briefly covers online research strategies and library database tips. Includes a discussion on determining when to quote, paraphrase, or summarize. Concludes with a lightly annotated sample student paper.
  • “Writers’ References” section covers MLA and APA documentation guidelines.

• Requesting Library Instruction
  See “Library Instruction” on the Belk Library web site
  http://www.elon.edu/e-web/library/services/instruction.xhtml

• Tailoring Library Instruction to Your Class
  What kind of tailoring has worked well for you in the past? What other ideas can we brainstorm to enhance collaboration and reinforcement between the library instruction and ENG 110 instruction?

• Library Scavenger Hunt
  Finding Sources for Student Selected Topic à Evaluating Sources à Summarizing and/or Evaluating Sources for a Mini-Annotated Bibliography

• Source Comparison Activities
  Give students, or have them find, different kinds of sources addressing the same topic à Compare the sources à Assess their reliability
  • Internet and Web-based Databases
  • Scholarly Journals Vs. Popular Magazines

• Analyze Summary, Paraphrase, and Quoting in a Sample Text
  Have students use unique reading annotations for each type of source use: underline summaries, put a box around quotes, and put asterisks on either side of quotes (or use different colored highlighters). Then have students examine why the author might have selected each source use strategy for the specific information conveyed. Students can repeat this activity with their own texts during self-assessment or peer review.

• Citation Quiz
  Test student comprehension of the parts of a citation and how to create citations for different types of sources. Could be used as a pre-test/post-test for tailoring instruction to specific section.

• Activities in Your Assigned Rhetoric
  The following examples from A Meeting of Minds: A Brief Rhetoric for Writers and Readers demonstrate how a rhetoric can help you integrate discussions of academic integrity and source use into direct instruction in writing. A small sampling of relevant topics:
  • Key Concept: Academic Disciplines as Research Communities
  • Strategy: How to Explore Questions with Discourse Communities
  • Conducting Research
  • Evaluating Sources
  • Strategy: How to Track Your Research with a Working Bibliography
  • Integrate Ideas: Summary, Paraphrase, and Quotation
  • Avoid Plagiarism: Cite Your Sources
  • Supporting Your Thesis Statement
  • Appendix: A Guide to Documentation
  • Plus many other integrated discussions and boxed strategies, key concepts, and applications…

Library Research Skills

• Searching the Belk Catalog by author, title, subject, and keyword to identify books and other materials in the library
• Locating and retrieving books and other materials in the library
• Selecting and using full-text databases (such as EBSCO or ProQuest) to retrieve full-text articles
• Using Boolean operators (and, or, not) to limit a database search to relevant articles
• Using Journal Finder to find journals, magazines, and newspapers in the library’s databases or in the library’s collection.
• Requesting books and articles through Interlibrary Loan forms (online and print)
• Distinguishing between articles from popular magazines and scholarly journals
• Recognizing the difference in information retrieved from the Internet and Web-based databases
• Evaluating the credibility of both print and electronic sources
• Asking a librarian for help when I need it
• Developing research questions and a strategy for answering them

*  These skills should be taught and reinforced through an assignment(s) that actually involves the student in hands-on use of library resources.

General Research Skills

• Students should be introduced to one of the major documentation styles, preferably MLA
• They should practice summary, paraphrasing, and effective synthesis of others’ ideas with their own
• In developing these techniques, they should learn how to avoid plagiarism
• They should begin to develop a sense of how to evaluate the credibility of sources, including both print and electronic sources