(DOWNLOAD) "Integrating Basic Research Into the U.S. History Survey." by Teaching History: A Journal of Methods # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Integrating Basic Research Into the U.S. History Survey.
- Author : Teaching History: A Journal of Methods
- Release Date : January 22, 2007
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 190 KB
Description
At my institution, like most others, we use the American survey both to refresh our students' knowledge of United States history and to hone their basic research, writing, and analytical skills. Until recently I, like most of my colleagues, used the traditional ten-to-fifteen page research paper to teach and test these skills. The paper worked very well as a way to produce a finished project, but I found it much less useful as a method of teaching students to think about research as a process. To help fill this gap, I developed a series of exercises that have proven effective as stand-alone assignments or when combined with a formal research paper. When I used the research paper alone, fewer than five percent of students indicated that the course helped them develop their research skills. Since I began using exercises such as those described below, roughly thirty percent of students list improved research skills as one of the strengths of the class. From a student's perspective the two main strengths of these assignments are repetition and the focus on research as a process. Students consistently indicate that they learn more from several short assignments than from one major paper. Additionally, students appreciate that these assignments combine group demonstration, individual hands-on experience, and class discussion. From my perspective as a teacher, these assignments are a simple, fast, and effective way to integrate research into the survey in a way that complements content. (1) When developing these exercises, I deliberately focused on electronic resources since they are the most efficient and popular types of research tools available to our students. They are also the only tool the majority of our students use. Despite the fact that most students rely on electronic resources, few have any formal instruction in their use. As a result, their search techniques tend to be haphazard and their results incomplete. Since the Internet became an effective research tool in the mid-1990s, historians too often have abdicated responsibility for introducing students to basic techniques and sources either by claiming some variation of "students today grew up with this and know it better than I do" or by denying the importance of electronic resources. Neither excuse holds up. While some students might be effective researchers, most are not. Insofar as they are successful, most students succeed primarily because the volume of available data is so great that even a poor search will generally locate an adequate amount of information. Since the late 1990s the amount of new information continues to be converted into more accessible forms. In 2002, for example, the equivalent of about 5.4 billion gigabytes of new information was stored on disk, film, or paper. If all this information were converted to paper, it would equal roughly 37,000 times the entire book holdings of the Library of Congress. This flood of information has fundamentally changed the way historians conduct research. Secondary searches have become far faster and more comprehensive than was possible a decade ago and in most areas primary materials are far more available, and, with full text searching, historians today can search many collections more easily and thoroughly than the original users. In order to be effective researchers, we need to be familiar with these resources. In order to be effective teachers we need to help students develop a few simple principles and techniques they can use to sort and sift this vast sea of information. (2)