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Community of Online Research Assignments

An open access resource for librarians and educators

Education Northwest

Education Northwest provides high-quality research, technical assistance, professional development, and evaluation services that address the most pressing education and youth-services needs in their region and across the country.

Finding a Book

In post-session feedback, first-year students frequently express anxiety over how to physically navigate the library to find a book on the shelf. This is a simple, pre-session activity to help students try this out before class, so that they can discuss with their librarian any challenges they faced in attempting to complete the task. With the help of the course instructor, students are asked to find a book on their research topic (or course topic) and bring it to class.

Developing an Interdisciplinary Search Strategy

This is an activity that helps students develop an interdisciplinary search strategy in stages. Students define their topic, brainstorm questions related to their topic area, and connect these questions to the disciplines and experts where they might find more research and information. Students learn how to identify search tools & information sources based on their questions using the library’s website.

Exhibition Explorer Card Deck: Experiential Learning for Rhetorical and Critical Thinking

Many academic and public libraries display their unique archives and special collections materials in exhibition spaces. With an array of primary sources and visuals, special collections exhibitions offer a wonderful venue for experiential learning of constructed narratives and perspectives. This Exhibition Explorer Card Deck is designed to guide students to experience close viewing of special collections materials through explicit steps for thinking rhetorically and critically in an exhibit space.

Stump the Database

This is a simple activity intended to warm up students, break the ice, and introduce the concept of keyword searching. Ask students to come up with a single word search that gives zero results. It’s harder than it sounds. It may be too elementary for graduate students or upperclassmen; use your judgement about students’ abilities and familiarity with searching. This activity can be a great segue in to a lesson on keyword development, Boolean operators, popular terminology vs. technical jargon, and the differences between different kinds of databases.

#researchspeeddate (think/pair/share for an online or hybrid class)

This assignment/activity works to pair students in fully online or hybrid courses in order to discuss, via phone or messaging app, any topic of choice. In this example, students in a 100-level composition course discuss their research topic of interest with their partner and offer each other suggestions for refinement. This assignment could be adapted in a variety of ways to support other research assignments or projects.

Mapping Audience & Purpose: Evaluating Sources

This lesson is designed for lower-division composition undergraduate students to learn frameworks for evaluating the audience and purpose of various information sources. After analyzing an array of sources for audience and purpose students can dig in to a source in more detail looking for markers of authority and discussing strategies for verifying claims.

A Peer-to-Peer Introduction to the University Library

This low-stakes, in-class assignment is designed to help first-year seminar students learn about important library resources and present their findings to their fellow students. In teams, students complete a series of authentic research tasks (called challenges) such as selecting and citing images from our digital collection and using our discovery tool to find books on the library shelves. Each team is also assigned a unique challenge to learn more about the library.

Artist Statements: Context, Content & Conversations

Art and design students are almost always asked to write about their work, in the form of an artists’ statement, at some point in their academic career. This is a skill that is crucial as they move from student to professional or practicing artist because it gives them the opportunity to reflect on their work, share concepts and develop their authority in their field, and, very importantly, discuss how their work builds on the work of others who share similar themes and/or processes.

Pick One, Any One? They're all just encyclopedia articles . . .

This exercise was designed for 1st year writing students with several different goals in mind: • encourage deeper, closer reading; • introduce the concept that information sources have perspective; • develop vocabulary around describing information and perspective; • acquaint students with the many values/uses of subject encyclopedias; • practice topic narrowing using these types of encyclopedia articles.

The Information Spectrum

This concept map and activity explores how various sources of information are created, accessed, and shared. Students collaboratively define what makes a source traditional, emerging, public, or exclusive. Students are given a type of information source to map on the grid according to each axis, and provide a rationale for their placement.

Subject-Specific ICT Literacy

This website provides several subject-specific guides to ICT literacy resources (bibliographies, websites, articles, learning activity ideas) to help faculty incorporate ICT literacy into their curriculum. Each subject guide can be accessed as an independent website. “ICT proficiency is the ability to use digital technology, communication tools, and/or networks appropriately to solve information problems in order to function in an information society.

Visual Aids and Descriptors in Primary Source Evaluation & Curation

This lesson was developed for HIS484 (Topics in the History of Gender and Sexuality/Pride in the time of HIV/AIDS) in the Spring of 2018. The students’ final assignment culminated in a multimedia or digital research project on a topic of their choosing and heavily relied on primary source and visual materials. This lesson focuses on how students, as content curators and analysts, can engage in deeper analysis and contextualization of the sources they present through their projects.

Narrowing a Topic

This lesson, created for English 2010, or Argumentative Writing, teaches students how to use library databases and keywords in order to focus their research topics. Most students come prepared with a general or broad topic in mind, but they need to narrow their focus in order to get more relevant search results. Here they simultaneously learn to search in and use the library databases and to focus their research topics.
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