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January Issue
Vol 24|No 3|January 2015
Great Research
by Jamie McKenzie (about author)
Photo from iStock.com
By Jamie McKenzie, ©2015, all rights reserved.
About author
A really great research project will demand original thought. Mere scooping and collection of information will not suffice. The project must be built around a question or an issue whose answer does not lie waiting on a Web page. This is not a scavenger hunt. Nor is it trivial pursuit. Photo from iStock.com Students must make answers. The research is like a shopping trip to find the raw ingredients that will be chopped up and combined to cook a great stew or sauce. Cooking should involve more than heating up "store bought" dishes in the microwave. Students as InfotectivesThe first step toward a sound research program is to think of students as infotectives. What is an infotective? A student thinker capable of asking great questions about data (with analysis) in order to convert the data into information (data organized so as to reveal patterns and relationships) and eventually into insight (information that may suggest action or strategy of some kind). An infotective solves information puzzles with a combination of inference skills and new technologies. The problem solving that often follows the detective work requires synthesis (invention) and evaluation (careful choices from lists of options). An infotective is a skilled thinker, researcher and inventor. Infotective is a term designed for education in an Age of Information. In the smokestack school, teachers imparted meanings for students to digest, memorize and regurgitate. In Information Age schools, students make the meaning. They puzzle their way through piles of fragments - sorting, sifting, weighing and arranging them until a picture emerges. These same skills produce high performance on the increasingly challenging state tests of reading comprehension and problem solving. As state standards require more and more inferential reasoning, state tests are asking students to "create answers" rather than "find answers."
Photo from iStock.com For decades, schools showed students basic problem patterns and asked them to memorize solutions. This approach will no longer suffice. Students are expected to handle the unexpected and the unfamiliar. Infotectives perform well on demanding comprehension tests, but they also make the kind of workers and family members we need to face the challenges of the next decade and beyond. (Note: this section first appeared in "Grazing the Net: Raising a Generation of Free Range Students." Not knowing what you do not knowWhen research centers on challenging questions and issues, the student usually does not know enough at the outset to plan the research. Unlike topical research, investigations built around mysteries, problems and conundrums require an exploration stage at the beginning so the student can begin to grasp the scope and the complexity of the issue at hand. The student progresses through the steps of the Research Cycle.
(*Reporting comes after several repetitions of the cycle create sufficient INSIGHT)
Finding Great QuestionsUltimately we expect students to learn how to find and pose challenging questions from within the content they are studying in our classes, whether it be biology, history, French or English. It is our hope that they will carry this questioning skill into their lives past schooling. The following articles from The Question Mark propose many ways to generate intriguing questions:
Photo from iStock.com |
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