8th+Grade+Research+and+Information+Literacy+Curriculum

This summer I received a grant to develop a research and information literacy curriculum to be taught in conjunction with the 8th grade Speech and Debate rotations. Barbara Share and I developed an outline of what we hoped this curriculum would accomplish, and I used this outline as a guide to develop lesson plans and lessons. I created lesson plans for the following topics:


 * Big6 Research Skills: a research process that students follow from start to finish when researching.
 * Citations: students will learn about proper citations and how to use Noodle Tools to develop citations.
 * Databases: this lesson focuses on introducing the RE databases when relevant to the students; only teaching those that will be used during an upcoming project so the students familiarize themselves with the databases while researching.
 * Plagiarism: this lesson will teach students about copyright laws, common knowledge, paraphrasing, and how to avoid plagiarism.
 * RaiderNet and OPAC: this is a very simple lesson to remind our students where to find all the library information on RaiderNet and how to search our Online Public Access Catalog.
 * Search Engines and Subject Directories: in this lesson students will learn about the advanced features of the major search engines; they will also be taught about subject directories (such as the Internet Public Library) and will be encouraged to use these when researching on the Internet.
 * Search Terms: students will be taught Boolean operators, to develop search terms before researching, and to use a keyword concept organizer.
 * Web Evaluation: this lesson will teach students how to evaluate web pages by using bogus websites that seem authentic, as well as to differentiate amongst websites by looking at the URLs of websites.

For the lessons that required it, I developed Power Points to teach the concepts to the students. These PPTs will be posted on RaiderNet for the students to review when necessary.

Barbara and I feel that teaching our students research skills and information literacy is what is expected from our evolving field. Doing this in conjunction with the Speech and Debate rotation will be the most effective way to deliver these lessons as our students will need to research for all the work they produce in the class thus making Information Literacy relevant to their academic studies. These skills will be used throughout the rest of their academic years at RE and in universities.