The following activities are ways to practice SLO 1: Find in your course. These lessons help build students’ skills and confidence related to creating and refining search strategies. They are designed to be scaffolded practice activities, and not a summative assessment of this learning objective.
In this activity, students are asked to work collaboratively to create and edit search strategies. It could work particularly well in independent seminars where content is not tied to a specific discipline, or if your learning community often works in groups and practices giving constructive feedback.
In this activity, students will identify important terminology related to a concept introduced in class, and create a series of search strategies related to the concept. It was adapted from a First Year Seminar that uses the “Term of the Day” Routine.
In this activity, students will turn a broad research topic into a specific research question by brainstorming broad categories of questions and ideas, listing keywords that fall within those ideas, and connecting keywords that spark interest into a research question.
The purpose of this activity is two-fold: 1) to teach students how to chase a citation backwards using the literature review, bibliography, works cited, or reference list from a main article or source, and 2) to teach students to chase a citation forwards using Google Scholar and library databases to find resources that cite their main article or source. Through these search strategies, students can find other relevant resources for their research questions.
Thank you to those First Year Faculty Instructors and librarians who allowed us to view and adapt some of your existing lessons to meet our Level 1 Student Learning Objective.
If you want help creating or adapting activities that reflect the I-Know Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) into your own course, you can contact Emily Sartorius at emily.sartorius@tamucc.edu.
