Please Stop Having Students Gather Research on Paper (Subtitle: Kill Research Notecards)

As a former English teacher, I was once guilty of this egregious sin, the research notecard.  Once upon a time, students were assigned a research paper (THE research paper).  Typically, this paper was assigned in Junior or Senior English.  The student would be asked to collect an arbitrary number of sources (10 or more usually), find quotes from the sources, write the quotes on an index card, and write the MLA (or APA) citation of the source on the card.  Then, the student would write a paper that somehow worked in these quotes.  This assignment was horrible in so many ways.  It had no real-world applicability, and it is no wonder that students dreaded writing the paper.

If you believe that the research notecard is dead or that it just applies to English classes, you would be sorely mistaken.  There are millions of teachers across the country who still assign the research paper and the writing of research notecards.  If you are guilty of this (as I once was), please stop!

Research-based writing was never the sole domain of English courses.  It is a vital part of every subject.  But, in secondary schools, it was always relegated to the English classroom.  With the adoption of Common Core standards by many states, research in the other disciplines has become emphasized.  However, the research paper has never been a good model of how research is gathered or used.

Research should be organic.  When researching a subject, students should be reading and viewing material from a variety of sources (books, web articles, videos, etc.) and evaluating that material.  Then, they should be taking that material and creating something new from it.  This process is how research works.  A scientist interested in stem cells will read and collect everything known about stem cells and then use that knowledge to discover something new about stem cells.  A mechanic who is replacing brakes on a new car model will research diagrams and instructions, internalize the information, and then put new brakes on the car.  Does the scientist or the mechanic carry around a stack of index cards with the information.  No!

So, what is a teacher to do?  How can you teach students to gather research organically?

Evernote

You may have heard of Evernote.  You might even use Evernote, but this powerful platform is ideal for teaching students to gather research.  Simply put, Evernote is a digital scrapbook.  With ease, it gathers information and organizes it into notebooks.  You can create text, upload text, or upload images and save it to a notebook, or you can save images, screenshots, webpages, and bookmarks from the web using a browser plug-in.  On a phone, you can even snap a picture of text and Evernote will gather the text from the image.  Each piece of information added to Evernote becomes a "note" in the notebook.

Additionally, Evernote is available on every platform with any significant user base (iOS, Android, PC, Mac, browser-based).  When a student creates an Evernote account, no matter where Evernote is installed, the information in the account will sync across the platforms.  For a teacher, a great feature of Evernote is that, once a student has created a notebook full of information, she can share that notebook via email or a public link.  

Web app view

For student purposes, the best part of Evernote is the web clipper.  The web clipper is an extension available for every major browser that allows the user to simply click a button and save whatever is on the webpage to Evernote.  Students can search, browse, and read while quickly saving anything of interest.

Web clipper options

Imagine: A student is collecting research on a topic.  She begins in class collecting research and saving it to Evernote.  When she goes to bed that night, she is thinking about her assignment.  She grabs her phone, access Evernote, and continues adding to her research before falling asleep.  Once her research is finished, she shares the notebook with her teacher.

A research assignment doesn't have to be a paper!  You can have students gather research on any topic.  Then, you can have them share their Evernote notebooks with you.  You can comment on their research and help them evaluate good and poor sources.  One of the most important technology skills that today's students will need is the ability to discern good information from bad.  Try using Evernote to help them learn this skill.  Engage them in conversation.

If you want to check out a sample notebook that I gathered containing research on the current unemployment rate in Georgia, just click HERE.