Civics CBA: The Research/Inquiry Process

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SIRS Research Guide including editing and revising work: See also Documentation/Citation & Info Ethics on tab bar under Research Tools.

Alabama State Library Media Handbook and Plan

Cecil County Public Schools Library Media Curriculum

Iowa City Library Curriculum

Learning Commons Examples

New York City Information Fluency Continuum

Information Models Compared by the Ontario School Library Association

A Comparison of Inquiry/Research Model Processes (across disciplines)

MEMO Standards

TPS Quarterly

Click on the name of each strategy below to access an explanation of the strategy, as well as related resoruces. The letters in parantheses indicate if the reading strategy is best used before reading (B), during reading (D), and/or after reading (A).

Annolighting A Text (D/A)
This active reading strategy links concept of highlighting key words and phrases in a text and annotating those highlights with marginal notes.  

Annotating A Text (D/A)
Annotating a text is an effective strategy to promote active and critical reading skills; this strategy provides a number useful acronyms that students can use to remember different elements of writer's craft when reading and annotating a text.

Anticipation Guide (B)
Anticipation guides are typically used as a pre-reading strategy and help to engage students in thought and discussion about ideas and concepts that they will encounter in the text.

Checking out the Framework (B)
This strategy provides students with suggestions for previewing texts of different genre in order to read strategically based on their purposes for reading the text.

Collaborative Annotation (D/A)
This strategy engages students in a process of co-constructing their interpretations of a text through a collaborative annotation activity.

Conversations Across Time (B/D/A)
This reading strategy helps students to develop deeper insights by making connections between and across texts from different time periods in response to a common topic, theme, or essential question.

Dense Questioning (D/A)
The dense questioning strategy can be used to help students pose increasingly dense questions as they make text-to-text, text-to-self, text-to-world connections.

Frame of Reference (B/D/A)
The frame of reference strategy teaches students how to create a mental context for reading a passage; this is accomplished by helping students to consider what they know about a topic and how they know what they know.

Inferential Reading (D/A)
The inferential reading strategy provides a list of the various types of inferences that readers make while reading even seemingly straightforward text; recognizing that there are different types of inferences helps students to analyze text more consciously and strategically.

Interactive Notebook (B/D/A)
This highly adaptable strategy encourages students to use a two-column note-taking strategy.  In the right column, they take notes to synthesize essential ideas and information from a text, presentation, film etc.; in the left-hand column, they interact with the content in any way they choose (personal connections, illustrations, etc.).

Key Concept Synthesis (B/D/A)
The key concept synthesis strategy helps students to identify the most important ideas in a text, put those ideas into their own words, and then make connections between among these important ideas.

Listening to Voice (D/A)
This strategy helps students to analyze and interpret writer's voice through the annotation of a passage, with particular emphasis on dictions, tone, syntax, unity, coherence, and audience.

Metaphor Analysis (D/A)
This adaptable strategy teaches students how to analyze a complex metaphor and substantiate interpretive claims using textual evidence.

Parallel Note-taking (D/A)
The parallel note-taking strategy teaches students to recognize different organizational patterns for informational texts and then develop a note-taking strategy that parallels the organization of the text.

QAR: Question-Answer Relationships (B/D/A)
The QAR strategy helps students to identify the four Question-Answer Relationships that they are likely to encounter as they read texts and attempt to answer questions about what they have read.  These include "right there" questions, "think and search" questions, "author and you" questions, and "on my own" questions. 

Questions Only (B/D/A)
The questions only strategy teaches students how to pose questions about the texts they are reading and encourages them to read actively as they work to answer the questions they have posed.

RAFT: Role, Audience, Format, Topic (A)
This is a flexible post-reading strategy that helps students to analyze and reflect upon their reading through persona writing.  Based on suggestions provided by the teacher or generated by the class, students choose a Role, an Audience, a Format, and a Topic on which to write in response to their reading.

Reciprocal Teaching (B/D/A)
The reciprocal teaching strategy enables students to activate four different comprehension strategies - predicting, questioning, clarifying, summarizing - which they apply collaboratively to help each other understand a text they are reading.

Sociograms (D/A)
A sociogram is a visual representation of the relationships among characters in a literary text.  Students can make use of pictures, symbols, shapes, colors, and line styles to illustrate these relationships, to understand the traits of each character, and to analyze the emerging primary and secondary conflicts.

Think Aloud (B/D/A)
Skillful readers unconsciously use a range of strategies to make meaning from text.  The think aloud strategy involves modeling these strategies by "thinking aloud" while reading and responding to a text.  By making explicit for students what is implicit for more expert readers, it becomes possible for students develop and apply these strategies themselves.

Transactional Reading Journal (D)
The name of this reading strategy is inspired by the work of Louise Rosenblatt (1978), who explained reading as a transactional process that occurs between the text and the reader.  The Transactional Reading Journal builds on this concept (via Jude Ellis) and provides a flexible framework for engaging students in a process of active and personally meaningful interaction with a text.

Writer's Craft Seminar (B/D/A)
This reading strategy teaches students how to analyze text through close reading in order to formulate a interpretive thesis that is supported through assertions and textual evidence.  Students present their interpretations to the class through a seminar format.

Click on the name of each strategy below to access an explanation of the strategy, as well as related resoruces. The letters in parantheses indicate if the reading strategy is best used before reading (B), during reading (D), and/or after reading (A).

Annolighting A Text (D/A)
This active reading strategy links concept of highlighting key words and phrases in a text and annotating those highlights with marginal notes.  

Annotating A Text (D/A)
Annotating a text is an effective strategy to promote active and critical reading skills; this strategy provides a number useful acronyms that students can use to remember different elements of writer's craft when reading and annotating a text.

Anticipation Guide (B)
Anticipation guides are typically used as a pre-reading strategy and help to engage students in thought and discussion about ideas and concepts that they will encounter in the text.

Checking out the Framework (B)
This strategy provides students with suggestions for previewing texts of different genre in order to read strategically based on their purposes for reading the text.

Collaborative Annotation (D/A)
This strategy engages students in a process of co-constructing their interpretations of a text through a collaborative annotation activity.

Conversations Across Time (B/D/A)
This reading strategy helps students to develop deeper insights by making connections between and across texts from different time periods in response to a common topic, theme, or essential question.

Dense Questioning (D/A)
The dense questioning strategy can be used to help students pose increasingly dense questions as they make text-to-text, text-to-self, text-to-world connections.

Frame of Reference (B/D/A)
The frame of reference strategy teaches students how to create a mental context for reading a passage; this is accomplished by helping students to consider what they know about a topic and how they know what they know.

Inferential Reading (D/A)
The inferential reading strategy provides a list of the various types of inferences that readers make while reading even seemingly straightforward text; recognizing that there are different types of inferences helps students to analyze text more consciously and strategically.

Interactive Notebook (B/D/A)
This highly adaptable strategy encourages students to use a two-column note-taking strategy.  In the right column, they take notes to synthesize essential ideas and information from a text, presentation, film etc.; in the left-hand column, they interact with the content in any way they choose (personal connections, illustrations, etc.).

Key Concept Synthesis (B/D/A)
The key concept synthesis strategy helps students to identify the most important ideas in a text, put those ideas into their own words, and then make connections between among these important ideas.

Listening to Voice (D/A)
This strategy helps students to analyze and interpret writer's voice through the annotation of a passage, with particular emphasis on dictions, tone, syntax, unity, coherence, and audience.

Metaphor Analysis (D/A)
This adaptable strategy teaches students how to analyze a complex metaphor and substantiate interpretive claims using textual evidence.

Parallel Note-taking (D/A)
The parallel note-taking strategy teaches students to recognize different organizational patterns for informational texts and then develop a note-taking strategy that parallels the organization of the text.

QAR: Question-Answer Relationships (B/D/A)
The QAR strategy helps students to identify the four Question-Answer Relationships that they are likely to encounter as they read texts and attempt to answer questions about what they have read.  These include "right there" questions, "think and search" questions, "author and you" questions, and "on my own" questions. 

Questions Only (B/D/A)
The questions only strategy teaches students how to pose questions about the texts they are reading and encourages them to read actively as they work to answer the questions they have posed.

RAFT: Role, Audience, Format, Topic (A)
This is a flexible post-reading strategy that helps students to analyze and reflect upon their reading through persona writing.  Based on suggestions provided by the teacher or generated by the class, students choose a Role, an Audience, a Format, and a Topic on which to write in response to their reading.

Reciprocal Teaching (B/D/A)
The reciprocal teaching strategy enables students to activate four different comprehension strategies - predicting, questioning, clarifying, summarizing - which they apply collaboratively to help each other understand a text they are reading.

Sociograms (D/A)
A sociogram is a visual representation of the relationships among characters in a literary text.  Students can make use of pictures, symbols, shapes, colors, and line styles to illustrate these relationships, to understand the traits of each character, and to analyze the emerging primary and secondary conflicts.

Think Aloud (B/D/A)
Skillful readers unconsciously use a range of strategies to make meaning from text.  The think aloud strategy involves modeling these strategies by "thinking aloud" while reading and responding to a text.  By making explicit for students what is implicit for more expert readers, it becomes possible for students develop and apply these strategies themselves.

Transactional Reading Journal (D)
The name of this reading strategy is inspired by the work of Louise Rosenblatt (1978), who explained reading as a transactional process that occurs between the text and the reader.  The Transactional Reading Journal builds on this concept (via Jude Ellis) and provides a flexible framework for engaging students in a process of active and personally meaningful interaction with a text.

Writer's Craft Seminar (B/D/A)
This reading strategy teaches students how to analyze text through close reading in order to formulate a interpretive thesis that is supported through assertions and textual evidence.  Students present their interpretations to the class through a seminar format.

Searchy Pants is a simple and safe internet search engine for families, children and pupils. Searchy Pants allows children, parents & schools to create a custom search home page for their child to use and allows families to easily communicate by leaving custom messages. Schools can also use Searchy pants to showcase pupils work while providing a safe search experience.

Searchy Pants uses School Safe Search technology to priorotise delivering safe learning content.

 A research project, whether it is a traditional paper, a video, or a media presentation, is the end product of a thinking process that involves student-centered questioning or inquiry.

Research is a life skill. We are always seeking information. What car or stereo should I buy? Which college should I choose? Which book should I read next? How can I sell this idea to my boss? How can I convince the school board to act on my proposal? Should I have this surgery? Our ability to use information helps us reach conclusions, make decisions, and communicate more effectively.

Just as the careful car stereo buyer may "research" Consumer Reports and ask friends for comments about which model is the best, the careful student researches a topic in the process of thinking through his or her project. It is important to triangulate information by checking a variety of sources.  The car or stereo buyer may consult as many different, reliable sources as possible, makes notes, asks questions, consults additional sources, develops a point of view based upon all of the information he has found. As students gather information to reach a conclusion or support a hypothesis, they develop lifelong skills of information fluency.

Information fluency is the ability to access, evaluate, use and synthesize information from multiple formats, and to ethically create and share new knowledge in any of a variety of media. Information fluency is a set of competencies, skills that will grow with students, even when current operating systems, search tools, or platforms are obsolete.  Information problem solving skills are required across all disciplines.

The research process and the writing process are connected. Research is of little value unless you can effectively communicate your new knowledge. The same skills that you use to write an expository paper are used to develop the research paper or a project in any medium. Asking solid questions, developing a clear and focused thesis, sketching an outline or a storyboard, drafting, revising, peer reviewing, and editing all are steps with which you are already familiar. The research process is recursive. Although we describe steps, you will find yourself going back and forth among the steps, returning to several as you refine your work.

1.     Read about a broad topic with "peripheral vision," looking for subtopics and important terms. You may choose to check reference sources and video for context as you get familiar with a subject.

2.     Identify focused questions you are interested in investigating (See Asking Good Questions)

3.     Gather a working source list. 

4.     Take notes on note cards or use NoodleBib.

5.     Look for patterns of information in your sources, your notes, your notecards.

6.     Develop clear and focused preliminary thesis. (See Developing a Thesis) 

7.     Gather information and evaluate the sources of information. (See Selecting and Evaluating Sources) (See Distinguishing Among Scholarly, Popular, and Trade Publications). Have you gathered a variety of quality materials? Have you gathered both primary and secondary sources?  (Note: For Language Arts projects, Your primary source may be the literary work you are analyzing.)

8.     Identify strong supporting points and rank them, making certain that the research and logical reasoning support them. Make sure that the evidence you collected is strong and that is directly supports your thesis.

9.     Develop an outline or storyboard or construct a visual organizing tool to organize your ideas and evidence.  You may choose to use Inspiration or any of many Web-based (See  MindMapping, Graphing, Timeling Tools  tools.)

10.  Prepare a rough draft WITHOUT USING NOTES, making sure that your own voice as a writer is clear.

11.  Add research documentation to the draft. (See In-Text Documentation) (If annotations are required, use this  model as a guide.

12.  Revise the draft.

13.  Have a classmate or friend peer review your work.

14.  Revise the draft.  

15.  Edit the draft.

16.  Prepare, proofread, and submit the final copy.

17.  If your teacher requires it, upload a copy of your work to Turnitin.com.

Remember, you may ask for help anywhere along the way!

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Research Strategy

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Technology & Learning, 4/1/2008

NCTE Definition of 21st-Century Literacies

Multimodal Literacies

English Language Arts Crosswalk

• Standard 1
• Standard 2
• Standard 3
• Standard 4

Reading Standards in History

• Standard 1
• Standard 2
• Standard 3
• Standard 4

Reading Standards Literacy in Science/Technology

• Standard 1
• Standard 2
• Standard 3
• Standard 4

Writing Standards

• Standard 1
• Standard 2
• Standard 3
• Standard 4

Crosswalk of Common Core Standards with AASL Standards for the 21st Century Learner

MILE Guide: Milestones for Improving Learning & Education (PDF)

Information literacy standards for student learning, indicators for student performance, and hundreds of collaborative lesson plans around the country give us some indication of the skills students are expected to master as effective and efficient users of information. Hopefully the goal is that all involved in information literacy education become wiser consumers of information. In mastering the elements of information inquiry, teachers and school librarians acting as instructional specialists model, teach and learn with their students the best ways to test and select information that is valid and relevant to solve information problems.