The author helps some kids make personal connections to what can seem irrelevant within the confines of classroom and curriculum. Interestingly, though, the most meaningful connections she has made with students have come not through quirky English teaching, but through her extracurricular interloping into the realm of social studies. The most…

Literature and liberal arts college students' early research experience usually stresses methodology and is carefully structured and supervised. In advanced work, students must begin to develop habits of critical thinking, personal involvement with their material, and development of a metacritical attitude. (MSE)

Freshmen often approach research papers by selecting a "giant topic" and going to the library to confront swamps and mountains of resources. A different approach to teaching research is designed to help students begin to shift the often counter-productive paradigm under which they operate. The classroom strategy proposed is 3-fold.…

This article explores the principles of structuring student classroom and library research. It is presented in the form of a workshop activity suitable for use in a geography department staff workshop. (JDH)

With resource-based learning projects, college students at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science develop a better sense of the information resources available, the nature of scientific literature, and the characteristics of scientific writing. Faculty motivations, benefits, and disappointments with this approach are addressed.…

Describes National History Day, an annual event in which students compete for state and national prizes awarded for the quality of their self-selected historical research projects. Evaluates the contest as an educational program, suggesting some implications it has for the teaching of history in the schools. Describes various student experiences…

Describes how the author's opinion of contests for students changed from generally negative to overwhelmingly positive after he had experience with them. Recounts his experiences with the contests and describes the projects entered by his history students. Concludes that contests can work well in motivating students to write research papers. (AEM)

Describes a model for the design, implementation, and evaluation of classroom instruction in which the teacher and media specialist work together and students produce a research paper, oral report, or audiovisual presentation. Both single-facet and multi-facet interdisciplinary approaches to the application of the model are described. (CLB)