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Pathfinders for research

Page history last edited by leslie whidden 13 years, 1 month ago

 Pathfinders are simply lists of information sources.

Pathfinders are not rocket science!...unless, that is, the topic actually is rocket science.

 

 So often, students fumble around with an overload of information in print and online. When a student gets lost in the chaos of information overload there's a chance the assignment might not be completed. Pathfinders help students to get beyond the searching and into the working. Pathfinders can be built by anyone who has taken the time to source the best information for a particular assignment or project. It's not just Teacher Librarians and teachers who build them. This an excellent project for students. With the completion of a pathfinder, students are then teaching other students, demontrating effective research practice. Pathfinders might be evaluated by the teacher as part of the asignment itself. One of the current proponents of Pathfinders is Joyce Valenza, Teacher Librarian at Springfield Township High School, Massachusetts.

 

 See Joyce Valenza's artpathfinder in the Jing screencast image below: 


 

 


 

 Good Pathfinders model good research practice. Students begin to identify a pattern for finding resources and eventually, we hope, imitate that practice on their own, in and out of school. Pathfinders may include reference works like encyclopedias, academic articles and journals in databases, web sites, print books and periodicals, digital images, and audio and video sources like podcasts and webcasts. Pathfinders may include web sites but the Pathfinder writer has previewed and evaluated the websites for accuracy, lack of bias, currency, and navigability. What a student gets with a Pathfinder is direct entry into the assignment.

 

 Link to Joyce Valenza's pathfinder page by clicking on the Jing screencast image below:

 


 

 


 

PATHFINDERS with World Book Online 

 

Pathfinders are great tools for the classroom.  To maximize students' creative thinking when using pathfinders, they should create their own paths for their intended audience to follow.

 

World Book Online offers a pathfinder feature which allows the creator to refer to current, edited and unbiased encyclopedic information.

 

How do I use Pathfinders to Encourage my Students to Think Critically?

 

Group work lends itself to the creation and use of pathfinders nicely.  Small groups of students should be given different topics to research.  Once a group has completed its research, they should isolate important points regarding their topic that all students in their class should know.  The group should then create a pathfinder their peers will follow to learn the topic's main points.  Once all groups have completed their assigned pathfinder, they should switch topics and follow their peers pathfinders.  This produces a sort of "jigsaw" group assignment.

 

A nice tech addition to this assignment would be to have each group defend their pathfinder material choices through the use of a voicethread Voicethread .  This encourages them to think about "why" they chose the selections they did.   

 

Alternatively, students may follow a teacher directed pathfinder to complete foundation research for a unit.  The link below leads to a World Book Online pathfinder created for students about to read Timothy Findley's The Wars.  

 

http://www.worldbookonline.com/advanced/pathfinder?id=AfP7sq

 

The material included in this pathfinder is fairly straightforward, but the activities associated with them involve creative thinking and tech tools.

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