Thing #17

Research and Reference Tools

Student Research
I selected the InfoTrac Junior Edition and InfoTrac Student Edition databases below to compare/contrast. I thought that the appropriateness, usability, content, and credibility for each of them was pretty good. I teach in the high school, so I would probably have a more difficult time determining if something was really appropriate or not (reading level-wise, content-wise, etc...) for an elementary student. But I did notice more Weekly Reader articles and such show up in the Junior edition which makes sense to me. Overall, I really like these types of search databases...especially when students can choose to search for just full-text documents. That puts all these resources at students' fingertips.

Advanced Research
I used the Academic One File to find an article on bacteria. I have used a lot of these research databases in my own research (graduate school stuff). And I have occasionally used these for finding articles for my classroom. One of the problems that I have is that since I teach science, once I get to these upper-level articles, some of the material goes way beyond (content-wise) what the vast majority of my students can really understand. But, I have tried several different guided activities to help my students "wade" through an academic article. That being said, not all the articles are way beyond reach for my students. For example, I can find Science articles that most students can understand (or at least understand most of it...maybe with a little extra coaching).

Works Cited 1
I used the MEL database (Academic One File) to search for an article about the new bacteria scientists have found that used arsenic as a component in its DNA. I needed to click on the News Article tab to find a super current news article related to this current topic. Here is my citation in APA format:

Overbye, D. (Dec 14, 2010). Poisoned debate encircles a microbe study's result. The New York Times, p.D4(L). Retrieved December 19, 2010, from Academic OneFile via Gale:http://find.galegroup.com/gtx/start.do?prodId=AONE&userGroupName=lom_accessmi

Works Cited 2
As a Calvin graduate and frequent user of the site, I choose KnightCite to use to create a citation for a journal article. I found that KnightCite actually is a better citation machine than CitationMachine when it comes to some APA formatting issues (there were even some formatting errors in the tutorial video using CitationMachine--Stephen King's entire first name was typed out when it should have just been an initial, S.). Here is my citation:
Overbye, D. (2010, December 14). Poisoned debate encircles a microbe study's result [Electronic version]. The New York Times, D4(L).