Narrowing the research focus

On the AASL Forum list, Patricia writes:

...there are many different components to the research process.

I am planning on breaking things down into tiny little bits for my students and first I need to teach my students how to narrow down their research topics - topics like global warming and water pollution, which yielded thousands of results in the databases we've used.

Does anyone have a lesson plan on how to narrow down a topic? Or ideas for teaching how to narrow down a topic?

As a school librarian, "narrowing the focus" was always my opportunity to focus on making the research releveant. And by relevant, I asked students how they could make the question they were try to answer topical/timely, personal, or local.

In my column "It's Personal," I wrote:

The lesson I learned as a librarian was that it’s possible and useful to blend a student’s personal interests with academic standards. Making a subject relevant because it is personal, local, or topical was critical if I wanted a learner who did more than just go through the motions.

When it came to helping my library-using students find a book or magazine to read, I had always “personalized” the effort. “Oh, that’s right, you like science fiction, don’t you? Here’s a new one that just came in. Read it and let me know what you think.”  

Personalizing the educational experience has a number of benefits:

• Hooking kids through personal interests increases the likelihood of them demonstrating
  other positive dispositions. Grit. Self-teaching. Curiosity. If what you are learning has
   meaning, you’re more likely to stick with it.
• School projects that have the greatest chance of success will be those that help students
  solve personal or personally interesting problems. Learning to do an effective Internet search
   just might be worth the time and effort if the result may be locating materials that are actually
  useful or interesting.
• Creativity is the by-product of finding solutions to personal problems. It was a person - an
   inventor, an author, a technology guru - solving personal problems in a unique way that results
  in new products.
• Children read more and at a higher level when the material they read is something of interest.
  Ever have a child who couldn’t sound out “cat” or “dog” in the basal reader, but could read
  “differential” or “transmission” just fine in Hot Rod magazine? 
• Teachers will need to provide the “why is this important” link in all their lessons.We all pay more
  attention when we believe what the speaker’s topic has value to us personally. As a parent, I too
  often heard the refrain, ‘Why do we have to know this stuff anyway?” from kids. And not having a
  better answer than “It’ll be on a test you need to pass to get into college” was discouraging.

I'm not sure there is a lesson plan that can be used with an entire class that will help students make a topic more relevant. I always found one-on-one conversations to be most effective. And after a few years of being asked to think "personal" about research, it became natural.

Comments

[Terri]

My co-librarian and I do a lot of modelling how to narrow down a topic with classes (which many times makes our topic "personal" to the class as a whole).

We start out talking about narrowing down a topic like "music" but finish up with one that's directly related to the class assignment.

Our biggest stumbling block comes when the kids are asked to research something for which they have no background knowledge and are given no time to gain any! Any suggestions on how to deal with that?

[Doug Johnson]

HI Terri,

One of the things I was taught that a great use for a general encyclopedia (and I suppose now Wikipedia) is to gain a broad overview of a topic. Might that be a starting point for all reseach?

Doug