PaperToolsProª is an integrated approach to writing a research paper that challenges the user to employ higher order thinking skills to solve problems, not just to create a collection of activities to do on the computer or to fill text boxes.
Writing a research paper requires students to develop reading, researching, organizing, analyzing, synthesizing, evaluating, as well as writing skills. Because the assignment requires them to practice these skills independently, when an instructor is not present, they need to also develop the ability to think about what they are doing, monitor their progress, identify and solve problems, make adjustments, set goals, and self-evaluate. The students who learn these skills are independent learners, but most students and even professional writers need some help. Although PaperToolsProª is not a substitute for good teaching in the classroom, it can reinforce good teaching and provide much of this assistance when the student is not in direct contact with his teacher.
The confidence we have in PaperToolsProª is comes from
Metacognition is the basis of sound education. Student can regulate their own learning, but when they are confronted with an academically challenging assignment, (such as a research paper), those who succeed have greater metacognitive abilities than those who do not succeed. Successful learners can self-direct, self-manage, and self-assess their learning (Paris, Wasik, & Turner, 1991; Michenbaum & Biemiller, 1998).
Unsuccessful learners do not develop the ability to manage their learning, but rather look to others, like their teachers, to tell them what they should learn and how to go about learning (Duke and Pearson, 2002). They may even ask, ÒDo we have to know this?Ó They do not see the need to participate in their own education. Therefore, they themselves do not know if they understand what they were supposed to learn. Even if an assessment of their comprehension tells them they did not learn the material and they believe the assessment results, they may not know how to change their behaviors. The only strategy they may use is to repeat what they have done unsuccessfully--reread the assignment several more times. The frustration of failure leads to feeling helpless, blaming others and even giving up.
These metacognitive skills, however, can be learned (Carr, Kurtz, Schneider, Turner & Borkowski, 1989). As part of their education, students must be taught strategies that help them
Successful teachers consciously teach metacognition by means of direct instruction, modeling, and providing frequent opportunities to practice these skills successfully (Santa, Havens, & Valdes, 2004).
PaperToolsProª is about metacognition. Students who have developed metacognitive skills and successfully apply them to writing research papers will find that PaperToolsProª enables them a means to continue approaching their work as they have done in the past. Because PaperToolsProª gives them the ability to enter a paraphrase in their own words in a text box right below where they entered the original quotation, they can determine:
However, for students who struggle to understand their own learning process, PaperToolsProª gives them the instructive reminders about plagiarism, the examples in the tutorial, and the text box to type in, rewrite, and revise a paraphrase. Thus, in collaboration with good classroom instruction, PaperToolsProª instructs, models, and provides limitless opportunities for practice. For students who do not see the need to establish learning goals or do not keep one in front of them, the text box for the thesis statement, which can be revised during the process of researching the topic, visually keeps that goal in front of them.
Thinking skills: Higher order and lower order. The research paper assignment provides students an opportunity to develop their researching, reading, and writing skills. As students become engaged in their research and they realize documenting their note taking is easy, the content becomes more important to them than the format. PaperToolsProª allows students to focus on thinking about their topics: how they are going to find, record, and communicate their information; and how they are going to learn the material so that they can organize it into an outline and talk about it in the draft.
Unfortunately, students often feel helpless when they are required to use and format citations and bibliography entries correctly. They enjoy engaging in the higher order thinking skills required to find and learn about their topic. However, memorizing or copying formats from a handbook does not engage them. They will never want to hold an animated conversation about the correct bibliography punctuation for a newspaper article in APA style, but they will want to share the content of their research with anyone willing to listen and share their enthusiasm!
Rather than documenting information throughout the research process, unsuccessful students will add bibliography and citation entries after they complete the engaging part of the paper, the content. As a result, these lower order thinking tasks are done poorly, if at all, and sometimes at the last minute just before the deadline. Because of faulty documentation, plagiarism becomes the focus of the evaluation of the studentsÕ workÑeven if they had learned a great deal of interesting content information and practiced successful strategies for learning. No wonder poor students become disappointed with the poor evaluation others give to work that they may see as their best effort. And the product may actually be the best they have accomplished. Ironically, they are penalized for focusing on higher order thinking skills and ignoring the lower order thinking skills. PaperToolsProª will let students focus on the content while the software manages the formatting throughout the process.
Finally, successful students look for patterns and organization in the texts they read and in texts they write. They use a variety of tools to organize the content of their learning whether it is Venn diagrams, KWL charts, conclusion/support lists, problem/solution charts, journaling, or discussion. PaperToolsProª enables the students to annotate their information according to patterns they see by identifying each note card with at least 3 keywords as well as a slug or descriptor. Just like information in databases, online library catalogs, and search engines like Google that access information through keyword searches, PaperToolsProª enables students to also search their note cards by means of the keywords and slugs that they assigned to each card as well as specific words or phrases in their notes. As a result, they organize their information as they are entering itÑat that time when they think about how one piece of information fits into the whole body of knowledge they have so far accumulated, learned, and reflected upon.
By keeping an Ideas Page as an open word processing page to list keywords and main ideas that may be important in the final paper, students can then reflect on what they have read, select those ideas which they want to use, order them with Roman numerals, and state that main idea in a sentence. They then have the beginnings of not only an outline to their paper, but topic sentences for paragraphs.
Students need to learn and practice the strategies that will make them independent, reflective learners. PaperToolsProª provides them these opportunities.
Research done by Freeman, Dyson, Flower, and Chafe in 1987 resulted in a model to show the process a writer uses to create the written product.
1. Writing employs a series of important processes that are not necessarily linear: planning, writing, and reviewing. The order that a writer chooses to use these processes is determined and organized by the writerÕs personal goal.
2. Writing is a problem solving process with steps taken in the order that the writer sees will help achieve his goal. Communicating the main idea usually becomes the principal goal to achieve. However, in order to solve that problem several other goals and problems must be solved. Solutions to some of these problems may be automatic and the student may not be conscious of these processes; others take time, engagement, and skill that must be learned.
3. Expert and novice writers solve writing problems differently.
4. As the topic becomes more abstract, more planning is required. Expert writers think about possibilities and connections between ideas before making changes.
This research demonstrates the importance of metacognition to the writing process as writers set goals, manage their progress with various strategies to solve problems, and assess their progress and their product. PaperToolsProª provides the means to think about researched information as it is put in studentsÕ words, to plan and organize the paper by connecting each note card with keywords that relate to information already gathered, and to allow students to focus on their papersÕ content rather than on the mechanics of documentation.
Writing is not a tool for its own sake. It empowers students to learn; it provides them a tool for thinking and developing their language and cognitive skills. Students using PaperToolsProª transfer what they have learned from their reading into their own words, their understanding of their research. It provides the thinking connection between studentsÕ reading and their writing.
A friend of mine handed me his new business card that described his new company and his new career. I knew him once as a librarian, but now he is an Information Architect, doing metadata and thesaurus design. Daily, the amount of information available as well as the number and kinds of sources grows exponentially. The expertise needed to access, use, and make sense of all this information involves information architecture, taxonomic metadata, and metadata management in order to achieve Òfindability.Ó These are not just new vocabulary words; these are new concepts.
Educators have an exciting yet enormous job to teach not only an increasingly amount of content, but to teach their students how to learn, how to find information, and how to use it. While the world is daunting to both educators and their students, students can learn certain skills and strategies to help them succeed in the Information Age.
PaperToolsProª provides them the opportunity to practice and develop these skills and strategies when they are asked to solve a problem, argue and persuade, inform, or make sense from and present information. The steps listed below follow the instructional model of The Big 6 (Eisenberg).
The beginning of every solution to any problem is to determine what really needs to get done and what steps must be taken to reach that solution. First, students must determine what they already know about this problem and the means to reach the solution.
An assignment, whether imposed by a teacher or by the student, will become the stimulus for learning as long as the student establishes its purpose. Typical research purposes like any writing purposes are to inform, persuade, or analyze. As in the real world, there are no templates for problem solving because each problem is unique and has within it
PaperToolsProª will not help students establish a purpose for their learning. Good classroom teaching and guidance will assist them to identify the real problem they need to solve in order to complete the assignment. A teacher can model and encourage the use of many of the metacognitive strategies listed above to support students as they direct, manage, and assess their assignment. However, once the student has a goal statement, PaperToolsProª provides a textbox in the Note Card Editor screen where a thesis statement is entered so that the student maintains this focus throughout the project.
Strategies to Search for Information
Students know how they will begin their searchÑgo to the Internet. However, without a clear purpose or sound researching skills, Google could provide millions of hits. Which one/s will provide the information they want? Students need to have a plan to use complex sources like databases in order to avoid information overload. Therefore, students must learn to search for different kinds of sources and how they can be foundÑspecific kinds of sources and a variety of sources. Having students create in their minds the perfect sources for their topic will often guide them to one that already exists. For example, once when I was looking for book reviews of Isabel AllendeÕs novel, House of Spirits, I wished that somebody had made a list of all the book reviews of this novel, bibliographic information for the book as well as the reviews for a particular year, a key quotation from each review, and the length of the review. A librarian immediately directed me to Book Review Digest. Publishers of reference material are always looking to build that great mouse trap to attract the researchers of the world. Good researchers always establish good relationships with good librarians!
Strategies to search for information are also necessary when students search their own notes for a specific piece of information or when organizing their notes. As stated earlier, PaperToolsProª enables students to identify each note taken with a slug/descriptor and up to 3 keywords. Clicking the Compile Notes button brings students to a window where they can perform a keyword search or a Boolean search to query the database of all the cards that meet the conditions they set. These searches can be as complex as necessaryÑto find all the information to put in a paragraph, a Roman numeral of an outline, or a chapter in a book. (Chapter 12 will discuss this in detail).
Knowing how to use a source also is important. Regardless of the kind of source, students must evaluate the usefulness of every source and determine whether it is
á accurate
á reputable and scholarly with a bibliography and citations
á written by an expert in that field
á objective (or the bias is clear and relevant to the topic)
á current if necessary, or sensitive to its date of publication
á geared to the appropriate audience (information intended for middle school students would not be appropriate for a college research project).
For books online or a paper copy, skimming the Preface, Forward, or Introduction will reveal the goal or focus the author/s had in preparing this work. The Table of Contents and Index will provide an overview of the source and the ability to access exact pages. References and citations could lead to other sources recommended by the author. The authorÕs assumed audience can be gathered from the vocabulary, tone, sentence structure, and complexity of information. Reviews of a source can also help determine its usefulness to the project.
PaperToolsProª includes a Resource page called Evaluating Sources that provides questions students should consider when selecting a source, whether paper or electronic.
Search and research will produce information that needs to be read, understood, written down either as a quotation or in the studentÕs own words, and the source of the information documented correctly. Researched information must be carefully recorded. Any step of this process is vulnerable to inaccuracies in information, source, and identification of whose words are used. If exact words are not in quotation marks or paraphrases of the information is not in the studentÕs own vocabulary and sentence structure, that information will be erroneously placed into the draft of the paper. Any of these errors, accidental or otherwise, can cause a paper to violate a schoolÕs Honesty Policy and demonstrate evidence of plagiarism. Information must be put to use truthfully because the purpose of research is to find and report information accurately and truthfully.
PaperToolsProª enables students to enter notes in the Note Card Editor screen by copy/pasting or drag/dropping a passage from a website or typing a quotation from a paper source into a text box for quotations. Instructions on the screen remind students to put quotations marks around the text inserted into the Quotation Box. In a text box right below the Quotation Box PaperToolsProª enables students to put that quotation into their own words. The instructions on the screen remind students that Òin your own wordsÓ means their vocabulary and their sentence structure. Because these boxes are next to each other, students can then monitor whether their paraphrase does indeed put the quotation in their own words and look significantly different from the original quotation. Students can then rewrite and revise their paraphrase. Unfortunately, it is easier to just change a few wordsÑand risk plagiarismÑthan to actually understand the quotation well enough to explain it in their own words. This text box provides the opportunity for students to think about and analyze the information they found, and monitor and assess their understanding of the information.
After the note card is saved, PaperToolsProª enables students to create a bibliography for the source if this is the first time notes were taken from it. Selecting the kind of source from a list, students are given an appropriate screen to enter bibliographic information and append a citation to both note card text boxes. If a bibliography entry was already made for the source, attribution is given to the note cards by clicking from a list of sources already used. If the student does not give attribution to a note card, a message box will appear as a reminder. Plagiarism is avoided because the informationÕs source is accurately documented and information is put to use ethically. A Resources page is always available for a review of how serious plagiarism is, what plagiarism is, and how to avoid it.
To put information to use, students need to use good information from a variety of good sources. Students should seek a diversity of sources so that their final product is as truthful as possible. Diversity may mean presenting a balanced portrayal of a controversial topic by providing sources from all viewpoints. Diversity can also mean using a variety of kinds of sources. Some topics may beg for a combination of paper and electronic sources while research about current events may require online sources from current news information sources rather than books published even last year. When the list of prior citations appears in PaperToolsProª, the sources are organized by kind of source, not alphabetical by author, unlike the final bibliography lists all sources by authorÕs last name regardless of the kind of source they are. This allows students to see if they used only websites when excellent books or scholarly journals were also available.
Synthesis
Beginning to write a research paper from a blank screen is daunting even if students have a command of the information they have gathered. The Tutorial accompanying PaperToolsProª suggests keeping a word processing page open while taking notes and reading. On this page, students should keep a history of keywords they used to access information from databases. In addition, they should keep a list of the important ideas that may appear in the final paper, as defined in the thesis statement. When they have finished taking notes, students should review that list, select those concepts which will be major to the paper, copy/paste them in the order they will appear in the paper with a Roman numeral in front, and express that idea in a complete sentence. Then they can go back to each Roman numeral entry and repeat the same process to get the subpoints that become the capital letter entries. The result is a sentence outline of their paper; that means they have an organization that integrates the information they have gathered with their prior knowledge and experiences, and they have topic sentences for many paragraphs. They will not start with a blank screen and they will have focused on the main ideas of their research based on understanding their topic. At this point they can monitor the thoroughness of their research and return to research for specific missing information that will prove their thesis sufficiently.
Students who write an outline straight from their note cards rather than synthesizing their information will lack a clear organization, possibly present a report of information by source rather than by idea, and demonstrate their lack of understanding of the topic. They will not have fulfilled the assignment or the goals they established; and they will not have synthesized their information.
After the sentence outline is completed, the note cards need to be organized. As discussed in Strategies to Search for Information, students can search their note cards for specific information that matches words/phrases in the notes, slugs/descriptors, and keywords. A screen enables students to create a keyword or a Boolean search of their notes. The selected cards with their citations can then be copy/pasted or drag/dropped into the appropriate location in the outline. The students then have the paper organized, topic sentences for many paragraphs written, and details in the form of notes with citations placed in their appropriate location. Students will realize that much of their paper is already written and they merely write their draft around this skeleton paper .
PaperToolsProª does not do summative evaluation, but as shown above it helps students do formative evaluation of their work and their thinking in all the steps that went into writing a research paper up to writing the draft. As a result, students have a basis for the self-evaluation and reflection they need to determine how well and how effectively they solved the problem they set out to solve. Likewise, a peer evaluator can benefit from seeing all the work that student did to complete the assignment.
Because the process of writing a research paper with PaperToolsProª is transparent to students, it can also provide transparency for the teacher. At any point in the process or at the completion of the final paper, students can email to their teacher
á project files created in PaperToolsProª
á an Ideas Page
á note cards and bibliographies created in PaperToolsProª and transferred to a word processing page.
They can also provide a paper copy of anything transferred to a word processing page. Therefore, a teacherÕs evaluation of studentsÕ work can reflect upon not just the final product, but the process that went into creating the final product.
These are the principles, philosophy, and research that formed the foundation for creating PaperToolsProª. There is nothing new here, but rather this foundation has proven to enhance student success in thinking, reading, researching, organizing, documenting, and writing whenever good teaching and good learning have occurred.
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Paris, S., B. Wasik, and J. Turner. 1991. The development of strategic readers. In M. Kamil,P. Mosenthal, P. D. Pearson, R. Barr (Eds.), Handbook of Reading Research, Vol 11:609-640.NY: Longman.
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