Plan

Creating a Work Plan

Defining Your Information Needs

Consulting a Variety of Sources of Information

Research Questions and Exploring the Topic

Exploring Your Research Topic

Selecting Keywords

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Defining Your Information Needs At this stage, students are encouraged to activate their prior knowledge about their research topic. To determine what information they will need, students can brainstorm, create a word list or use a graphic organizer. The teacher will need to accompany younger students and provide more guidance to help them select their keywords.

Formulating a research question Formulating a good research question is the key to effective research. After establishing what they already know about their topics and what they would like to learn about them, your students will need to select the main question to guide their research as well as secondary questions. To do so, they can expand upon what came up in the activity to activate their prior knowledge. To have more information on how to formulate. inquiry questions, we invite you to watch this video (4:34).

Consulting a Variety of Sources of Information Students can be taught to identify the most relevant sources of information for their research topic by consulting a variety of sources:

• Books
• Dictionaries and encyclopedias
• Resource people
• Periodicals
• Articles
• Directories
• Databases
• Videos
• Etc.

Exploring the research topic Your students may not be very familiar with their research topics. In such cases, they may want to watch a short video, read a blog post, look at an image or consult an article in an encyclopedia to figure out what aspects of the topic to focus on to determine their main and secondary questions.

Selecting Keywords Before conducting their research, your students will need to identify relevant keywords. These words can be used in their research questions; they can also identify synonyms to ensure that their topics are well defined. Keywords can be selected by using the vocabulary identified during the activity to activate prior knowledge of the research topic. We recommend using common/proper nouns and avoiding adjectives (which can lead to biased results) as well as verbs and determiners. You can use collaborative tools to keep traces of keywords found for your research.