The research process: which model is best suited to elementary school use?

“Our business seems usually to be considered the bringing of books to people.” 

 -Louise Rosenblatt (2005).   Making Meaning with Texts: Selected Essays.  Heinemann: Portsmouth, NH. 

As TLs, one of our main roles is to assist students in the research process.  As Reidling suggests, this can be a complex task, but an important one, as students need to “possess the skills to learn efficiently and effectively” (Reidling, 2005). 

Carol Kulthau’s six-stage model, Information Seeking, has many admirable aspects.  I appreciate its emphasis on in-depth researching and selection of the best, not just ‘good enough,’ resources to utilize.  Getting students to produce work of the highest quality is a central challenge in elementary school researching. (the “Google” revolution has, in many ways, pushed students into locating any kind of information fast, but does nothing to help students critically evaluate what they locate through Google).  Creating ‘focus’ to any research project is also key to Kuhlthau’s model.  Learning “all about wolves” for example, and creating the classic project outlining wolves’ habitat, defences, enemies, and appearance  is perhaps less effective for researching than narrowing down  the topic to a single question of inquiry.  As Reidling states, “more is not necessarily better” (Reidling, 2005).  In this way, I also admire Stipling and Pitt’s The Research Process for it attempts to narrow a research topic to a single question. 

The Focus On Inquiry research model published by Alberta Learning in 2004 (see link below) is a similarly practical and effective research process.   I appreciate how it centers around the student-generated central question for research. In our online discussion, a classmate mentioned the classic "bird unit" (beavers, constellations, Ancient Egypt, apples...the list goes on and on) We still see this all of the time in schools. Like my classmates have mentioned, these are not necessarily bad things, and do serve a function. However, what the Focus on Inquiry model does is to help narrow down the idea of studying all about bees, to rather, "why do bees have yellow and black stripes?" and then to pursue that specific information effectively and efficiently. The Alberta model supports 'building a culture of inquiry" in our students through the teaching of metacognition (learning to learn). TLs and classroom teachers need to always keep in mind that the end goal is not just the successful completion of a research project complete with an eye-catching title page, but rather gathering lifelong information skills necessary for globally literate students.

Our goal is to “help students learn how to learn, to become lifelong learners.”  (Reidling, 2005) 

Focus on Inquiry (Alberta Learning, 2004):
http://www.education.alberta.ca/media/313361/focusoninquiry.pdf