Tompkins Cortland Community College Library
Faculty Borrowing

Teaching Tools for Research Skills

TC3 librarians aim to do everything we can to support the faculty and partner with you as you teach your students to conduct research in your discipline. To that end we have prepared this suite of tools, which we hope you will find useful. Each module consists of an online lesson that students can read on their own and a classroom lesson plan with suggested assignments and assessments. The classroom lesson plans can be used by faculty to lead the class; or you can ask for a librarian to visit your class to conduct the lesson. Reading through the lesson plan will let you know what to expect. Browser Note: Use Internet Explorer to view the graphic versions of the tutorials. They may not function correctly with Mozilla Firefox.

E V I D E N C E

One of the goals of a liberal education is to learn how to form opinions based upon reliable evidence. This lesson introduces the concepts of anecdotal evidence and research-based evidence and teaches students to recognize one type of research evidence, the quantitative study.

D A T A B A S E S

The purpose of this module is to help students learn basic database searching skills. Matriculated students should be exposed to these skills in their first semester.

D E E P E N I N G

In ENGL101 our students learn to search databases such as ProQuest and InfoTrac. Too many of them never move beyond that strategy. The purpose of this lesson is to get them to think less like students with a paper due and more like researchers with a purpose. It draws their attention to different types of sources they may find mentioned in their initial articles - experts, agencies, organizations and citations - and gives them practice in tracking them down.

C I T A T I O N

One of the most common questions we get at the reference desk is, “How do I cite this?” Citation is far more complex than it seems, requiring several cognitive tasks that must be accomplished in a logical order. The goal of this lesson is to help students break the citation process down into a step-by-step process and think clearly about each step.

C O N S U L T A T I O N

TC3 librarians have worked with many faculty members to develop assignments that foster good research skill. If you would like to collaborate on an assignment make-over, or perhaps look at how and when research and topic selection is introduced in your course, we would love to talk with you. Contact Barbara Kobritz at x4362 or BEK in GroupWise.

We welcome feedback on these tools. Please share your stories about implementing, customizing and improving these tools so that we can post them on this site for other faculty to refer to.

Last update: Monday, February 11, 2008