Research Project Skills

1. In Your own Words: Paraphrasing Research Project Skills

2. Consider • Completing a research project – and, at more advanced levels, a research paper – involves definite skills in acquiring information, interpreting it, recording it, and citing sources. • In some cases, it also involves assessing the relative merits of disparate sources.

3. Consider • While the library is usually a primary source of information, you may discover other valuable and relevant tools to gather data. • Magazine and newspaper articles provide current information as well as information relevant to the time it was published. • Photos can be utilized as primary and secondary sources, adding to the overall understanding of an event. • National and regional organizations are often willing to mail informative flyers and brochures. • Experts may be available for interviews in person, over the phone, by email, or by letter. • Surveys may be used to validate generalizations gleaned from research.

4. In addition, • The ability to take notes is a fairly complex skill involving not only comprehension, but also higher level thinking skills. • What higher level thinking skills do you think apply?

5. Research • Investigation through the final product involves: • Comprehension • Application • Analysis • Synthesis • evaluation

6. EQ • How do you interpret the information you find?

7. In Your own Words Paraphrasing

8. Paraphrasing • What is paraphrasing? • What are the benefits of paraphrasing?

9. Paraphrase • Definition: A restatement in one’s own words of another author or speaker’s ideas.

10. Consider • Students who have studied a foreign language recognize paraphrasing as a form of translation. • It involves restating the original in one’s own words with little or no condensation. • Paraphrase is most effective with relatively brief passages that are very important to the topic under consideration. What is more effective for extensive materials?

11. Practice with Proverbs • Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. • Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other, and scarce in that. • ‘Tis hard for an empty bag to stand upright. Paraphrasing requires both an understanding of the materials and the ability to use alternate wordings.

12. Another kind of paraphrasing Visual Thinking

13. EQ • How do you make sense of what you see when you look at an image, especially if that image comes with no caption, headline, links or other clues about its origins? • What can constructing meaning from an image teach you?

14. Visual thinking Strategies Visual thinking • It is critical thinking in the way you think and learn through theory and research that uses discussions of visual art. Supports skills such as: • Making complex observations • Drawing conclusions • Evidential reasoning • Considering a range of possibilities • Generating new ideas • Revision • Expressing and articulating ideas in writing • The ability to accept multiple viewpoints • Transfer of knowledge

15. Three Questions • What’s going on in this picture? • What do you see that makes you say that? • What more can you find?

16. What is going on in this picture?What do you see that makes you say that?

17. Post your Response • http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/whats-going-on-in-this-picture-jan-14-2013/#more-124178

18. What is this picture actually saying? • The caption Indonesians reclined on tracks in RawaBuaya, West Java Province, in the belief that the energy from the tracks would cure them of various illnesses. • The Jakarta Post also reports on the story in “Locals brave tracks for ‘railway therapy’”. You can read more about why people made the decision to recline on the tracks, and how this daily practice has caused problems for local train operators.