Like any other major undertaking, research papers require extensive planning. This section provides you with both a teachers’ guide and a students’ guide so that you don’t miss any of the steps.
A word of advice: Check out the Nonfiction Reading Strategies section in READING before you dive into this project. The biggest mistake we make when teaching the research paper is assuming that students know how to process what they read in the course of doing research. Not to state the obvious, but it’s hard to write about something that you just plain don’t understand.
Check out the History Writing: DBQ Essays page for more information on how to prepare students for research and writing, esp. in history. The "DBQ Approach" is like writing a research paper with training wheels, so it's a good place to start.
Here are some additional helpful research-oriented Websites, which in turn contain links to other useful sites (Many thanks to Mitch Brenner at KIPP-Infinity for these leads!):
***NEW: Here is a research paper project that has been effective with middle school students:
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Career Problem-Solving Research Project:
The basic premise behind this research project is that people who love their jobs spend most of their time solving problems that they care deeply about. Students confront these questions: What job would you like to do? What kinds of problems would you like to solve? If you could learn more about these problems, what kinds of questions would you like to explore?
In order to clarify their own career interests, students complete a simple survey on the 16 Career Clusters. Here’s a link to one that has been mimicked on many Websites: http://breitlinks.com/careers/career_pdfs/InterestSurvey.pdf
Timing: 10-15 minutes to take it, plus another 5-10 minutes to add up the results and read about the clusters.
Students select a cluster, narrow it to a particular career, and brainstorm on problems that someone with this career might be trying to solve, then think of questions that arise related to these problems (which could be quite divergent, and that’s fine).
For details, check out the full explanation of the Career Problem-Solving Research Project in the Download Zone.
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Here's another suggestion for a research paper assignment: Empathy Research Paper Assignment.
For additional student writing models and guides on how to judge sources, check out Write Source. For more information on plagiarism, copyrights, and citing sources (esp. online sources), this Webpage has links to more than a dozen useful Websites.
ALSO, Turnitin.com offers a thorough explanation of different types of plagiarism in this document: "The Plagiarism Spectrum: Tagging 10 Types of Unoriginal Work."
IN THE DOWNLOAD ZONE for Research Paper Guide:
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