General+Thoughts

Although research can be broken down into multiple steps, it is not at its best a neat and tidy process. In order that students develop the skills and understandings needed to venture the process successfully, they must practice each part of the process deeply and with reflection. It is better that we scaffold parts of the process in order that students can master each part independently with an understanding of its complement to the complete process. If students make a cursory effort to go through every step every time, they will not garner the necessary understandings and even worse will substitute effective practices with quick and easy fixes.

Of vital importance is a student's ability to analyze information in various forms with an emphasis on text. They need to be able to summarize, identify the author's purpose, highlight factual evidence, identify which information meets their information needs, and raise questions where previous understandings differ from new found evidence.