Teaching research skills

1. Teaching research skills

2. Aims and objectives • Getting started with research. • Moving beyond searching. • Creating a plan of research. • Teaching research by research.

3. Getting started with research Discuss: • What opportunities are there for research in your subject? • What difficulties do students face when they are asked to research? • What can you do to stop research exercises turning into ‘cut and paste’?

4. Moving beyond searching • There is more to researching than just searching. • Collection of information needs to be followed by analysis, synthesis and evaluation. • Writing up research as a story is better than simply assembling information.

5. Good research questions • Effective research begins with a good question Discuss: • What are the features of good research questions?

6. Creating a plan of research • A plan of research helps students to keep control of the research process and produce a well-organised research review. • Initial research is needed to establish a series of headings (which can be in the form of sub-questions) for the research review. Discuss: • Pick a topic that you teach, choose a research question, then make a plan of research. • Reflect on how you would teach students to do this.

7. Teaching research by research • The best context for teaching research skills is a small-scale pilot project (around 1,000 words). Groupexercise:createa pilot project • Spend the remainder of the session working with a partner to plan and begin a small-scale pilot project on a question of your choosing. • As part of your project, experiment with the tools provided on your computer for creating headings, citations, bibliographies and tables of contents. • Look for easy-to-access, high-quality research sources. • In the final few minutes of the session, share what you have learned with the rest of the group.