Teaching the Scientific Literature Review: Collaborative Lessons for Guided Inquiry

dTeaching the Scientific Literature Review: Collaborative Lessons for Guided Inquiry
by Randell K. Schmidt, Maureen M. Smyth, and Virginia K. Kowalski

While not the most important, I think my favorite line in the whole book is, "Don't go crazy with the highlighter."  Clearly written by people who actually teach kids, this book, like A Guided Inquiry Approach to High School Inquiry, provides an excellent balance between structure and freedom.  Students are guided through a process in which the first access general press article about a subject they are interested in researching.

Even after they have collected the six required gp articles, they are still not required to have defined their research question.  They use these articles to build background and to develop a vocabulary that will enable to navigate a search on a database.  I find this so satisfyingly brilliant after nearly a year and a half of watching teachers tell kids to, "Submit your research question, now!" after only a period of browsing.  We never expect this of ourselves.  Realistically, I frequently hit Wikipedia before engaging in formal or recreational research simply to gather search terms, including famous names in  a field, discoveries, significant historical events, and so forth.  Then I go about searching gp articles, and, if I am doing formal or professionally-oriented research, I will comb peer reviewed literature. They are guided through the process of highlighting, hence the exhortation at the beginning of this post, and annotating.  Using these articles, students are required to generate a reference list that is graded early on in the process, ensuring they understand how to use and double check EasyBib so they can continue adding to this list throughout the process.  In addition, students are required to keep track of search terms as they go.  I created a document to assist students in doing this as they go.

Students are guided through the process of writing an introduction, searching for and taking notes on peer-reviewed articles, researching in the collection stage and presentation stage, writing a methodology, creating a table, writing an abstract, crating a title and completing the cover page and much more.  A sample and an empty graphic, such as the one that follows helps students track studies for their methodology section:

	Study 1 Citation:	Study 2  Citation:	Study 3 Citation:	Study 4 Citation:	Study 5 Citation:	Study 6 Citation:
Questions driving study
Groups studied
Methods
Findings-Results of Each Study
How was the study analyzed:  (Why did the  researchers think they found what they found?)
Recommendations  (include any omissions)

This graph is what students will use to analyze their research.

I love these books because they provide structure and guidance that allows students to teach themselves content and ready themselves for college.