Ideas for Assignments

Search strategy

• Reflect on why an "OR" search brings up more results, or on how truncation works.
  
  
• Turn in copies of three or four different searches and ask explain which search worked best and why.
  
  
• Keep a research journal with guided questions.

Familiarity with a variety of resources

• Identify a reference source and explain when it might be used. Identify the major types of reference sources in a discipline.
  
  
• Find information on a topic in different types of resources (generalized/specialized encyclopedia, general/subject-specific database) and then compare/contrast the type of information provided in each.
  
  
• Compare primary and secondary sources on the same topic.
  
  
• Create a Web page on a narrow topic relevant to the course. List print resources, e-journals, discussion lists, and organizations.
  
  
• Write a biographical sketch of a famous person. Use biographical dictionaries, popular press, scholarly sources, Web sites, and books to find information about the person.

Familiarity with a discipline

• Choose a scholar/researcher and explore that person's career and ideas by locating biographical information, preparing a bibliography of his or her writings, analyzing the reaction of the scholarly community to the researcher's work, and examining the scholarly network in which he or she works.
  
  
• Examine the treatment of a controversial issue in several sources (newspaper editorial, scholarly journal, journals from different disciplines, etc.).
  
  
• Identify journals "basic" to a discipline. Compare and contrast them. Analyze their tone, content, audience and impact.
  
  
• Explore sources for professional development. Locate relevant professional journals, listservs and organizations.
  
  
• Identify a review article that was written a number of years ago and update that review.
  
  
• Explore through book reviews, biographical information , and citation indexes how and why a work becomes a "classic." What effect does a classical work have on a discipline?
  
  
• Track how the writings on a particular topic change over time. Look at a periodical index (or yearbook, handbook, etc.) at 10 year intervals.
  
  
• Trace an important paper through a citation index. What does it mean to be "cited"? How important is it that a scholar be cited?

Evaluation/Critical Thinking

• Include the evaluation of resources (based on a set of predefined criteria) as part of the annotations in a bibliography.
  
  
• Read an editorial and find facts to support it.
  
  
• Choose an autobiography of someone related to the course content. Find secondary sources which deal with an idea or event described in the autobiography. Compare and contrast the sources.
  
  
• Examine the credibility of the course textbook (or a major monograph in the field). Who wrote it? What are the author's credentials? What is the point of view of the book? Find reviews of it and suggest alternative works (with reasons).
  
  
• Identify and examine the assumptions implicit in an article. Identify the author's thesis. Outline the theoretical framework used to account for the results.
  
  
• Examine the experimental design, data, and interpretation of the data in a research paper for adequacy and consistency.
  
  
• Use an index to locate two articles which present differing viewpoints (scholarly/popular; conservative/liberal).
  
  
• Read several articles which appear to address the same question but reach different conclusions. Account for the differences by examining the methods used, the experimental design, and the interpretation of the results.
  
  
• Review a book. Discuss the author's credentials. Compare the book to similar works in the field.
  
  
• Read the articles cited in a research paper. Explain how each is related to the paper. Under what circumstances is it appropriate to cite other papers? What different purposes do the citations serve?
  
  
• Give the students an article to critique. Have them locate two Internet sources which support their response to the topic. Have them cite the URLs and highlight the points that show support of their response.
  
  
• Give the students a set of Web pages to look at. Have them note any reasons why these pages are, or are not, appropriate for university level student research or for in-class use.
  
  
• Have the students find a Web page or site of interest to them, or one that is appropriate to a project they are working on. Have them cite this page using a style manual and write 2-3 paragraphs evaluating the site they have chosen based on predetermined criteria.
  
  
• Determine the adequacy of a psychological test based on the literature about the test. Then develop a test battery designed for a particular clinical (or other) situation, by using published tests and the literature about them.

From: Suzanne Sexty. Ideas for library/information assignments. http://www.mun.ca/library/research_help/qeil/assignment_ideas.html. [Last accessed: 5/26/00]. & Lori Ricigliano. Ideas for Library Related Assignments. http://library.ups.edu/instruct/assign.htm. [Last accessed: 5/27/01].