JoDavis

The assessment performed at Stuart Burns Elementary focused on the research skills of fifth grade students. Through talking and questioning the fifth grade teachers, I discovered that many of our fifth grade students are lacking research skills and the ability to perform when asked to prepare research papers and perform small research tasks. Research skills have been something the fifth grade teachers have tried to work on more in the last two years but seem to struggle with being able to focus solely on teaching those skills. Through this assessment I was able to pin point the main issues the students are having and prepare a plan of action.  Stuart Burns Elementary School is located in Dickson County Tennessee and is located in the city of Burns. This school contains pre-k through fifth grade with around 650 students. The majority of the students are Caucasian at 93 percent. The faculty at Stuart Burns is made up of around 60 people including teachers and support staff. Around 33 percent of the student body are from an economically disadvantaged household. **Plan of Action **  Although most of the research I performed involved the students, by speaking with the fifth grade teachers I also realized that they would benefit from being educated on some other ways to find information and help the students with their research. During our meeting I mentioned to them the Tennessee Electronic Library (TEL) website and I was surprised to find out that they were not as familiar with TEL and the uses as I had originally thought. So I decided that I would provide a professional development day to teach them the many uses of TEL and mainly focus on the elementary portion. I plan to do a five day unit of instruction on research and citing sources, this will take over a month to get through, so the fifth day will be a review day. Lesson 1: Use This, Not That (Reliability of Resources) Lesson 2: Reliability Specialists Lesson 3: Citing Your Sources Lesson 4: Bring the University to the Classroom Lesson 5: Applying What We Have Learned
 * Introduction **
 * Teachers **
 * Students **
 * Pair-share discussing what reliable means.
 * Unguided research project Group A will be using the internet and the search Engine Google and Group B will be using preselected books and materials. Both groups will be researching dinosaurs and recording information they find in 20 minutes.
 * As a class we will discuss their findings and what was easy and hard about each type of research that was performed.
 * <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 16px;">We will make a poster listing our findings and discuss the correct and incorrect ways to use the internet.
 * <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 16px;">Each student will fill out an exit ticket telling me what they learned about reliability of resources for the day, so that I will know if we need to cover the information again.
 * <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 16px;">Quick Review of the previous lesson
 * <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 16px;">Students will be given two websites, one being Wikipedia and one being a reliable website on Dinosaurs. They will then each be given a specialist job to find out given questions from each site.
 * <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 16px;">Compare their results as a class.
 * <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 16px;">View a BrainPOP video that shows how to cite interviews, magazines, and internet sources.
 * <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 16px;">After the video the rest of the class will be dedicated to modeling and demonstrating online citation links, such as the one on World Book.
 * <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 16px;">I will have someone from a University or High School come and speak to the kids and talk about their experiences on dealing with the growing problem of plagiarism.
 * <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 16px;">We will review everything we have learned: how we can check for reliability and cite sources.
 * <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 16px;">We will then work as a team with the fifth grade teachers to have them help create a dinosaur museum in the library over the next several weeks.