Abed

My assessment is focused on addressing information seeking strategies in students at Whitworth-Buchanan Middle, specifically 7th graders from the Language Arts classes in mini school A. Since they will be researching European countries in January, they will need to know how to locate and evaluate a variety of information. After giving them a survey focused on information seeking strategies, I found that students are not sure how to access and use the card catalog at school. Also, only about half of them a) could distinguish a primary source from a secondary source, b) could understand which resource to go to in order to look for specific information on a research topic, and c) could use basic website evaluating strategies such as recognizing what the suffixes in domain names mean and what to type into a search engine to get the best results.
 * Introduction**

Whitworth-Buchanan Middle School serves grades 6-8 in Rutherford County with a population of 694 students. Of the total students, 70.3% are white, 17.4% are African American, 6.5% are Asian, 5.7% are Hispanic, and 1% is Native American or Alaskan. Also, 51.7% of students are economically disadvantaged. 47.4% of students are female, and 52.6% are male (Tennessee Department of Education, 2012).
 * School Demographics**

Since my needs assessment revealed that 7th grade students at Whitworth-Buchanan Middle School lack in information seeking strategies, I plan to fill the gap by introducing students to a variety of print and electronic resources and by teaching them how to evaluate the reliability of those resources.
 * Plan of Action**

First, students will collaborate in groups of three or four to complete a scavenger hunt through the library; some computers will be used in the scavenger hunt as well. This will allow students to explore the variety of resources that the library has to offer. It will be based on the pathfinder that I created on European countries since they will need to find information about specific countries. The scavenger hunt will send them to the card catalog, encyclopedias (print and electronic), atlases, almanacs, Gale student databases (through TEL), periodicals, and media resources such as the DVD collection. Through the scavenger hunt, students will be able to know the purposes of the resources and how to access them. They will answer questions together as they do the scavenger hunt, and their work will be turned in at the end of class.

The next day in class, students will learn strategies for evaluating resources. They will learn an acronym (such as CRAAP) in order to remember what to look for when they evaluate websites and periodicals. They will also learn what commonly used domain suffixes stand for and how to use them as evaluation criteria. I will show them both unreliable resources and reliable resources, and they will compare and contrast them.

Another way to fill in the gap is to model what to type into a search engine or database in order to get the best results. After I model how to narrow the search results, students will work together to search for information about their specific topics, and I will guide them as they search. As they find information, they will evaluate its reliability and relevance.