Assignment Author
Jessica GoudeauContext of Assignment
Writing Research Summaries
Pedagogical Goals of the Assignment
Get comfortable with the Little Penguin Handbook and learn about citation
Assignment Description
Citation Scavenger Hunt:
To get past my students’ fear of the Little Penguin Handbook, we did a Citation Scavenger Hunt together. I had it on my syllabus to bring their Little Penguin that day, but I actually wrote it after my students’ first research summaries, so I tailored it particularly to the five problems I saw the most in my class. We did it the day I was giving them back their first research summaries. I put it up on the doc cam as they were walking into class, so many of them had several minutes to find the answers to the questions. I had them bring a clean copy of their article for RS 2 to class and use it for the article title, etc. On a separate sheet of paper, they completed the scavenger hunt quietly for ten minutes or so.
We then talked it through together. Predictably, a number of my students didn’t find all of the answers or the right sections, but it did get them accustomed to flipping through Little Penguin and it helped them ask questions about citation they might not otherwise have asked. Also, it kept me from having to memorize the section numbers for citations! Instead, they feel a little bit more ownership of their citations; they’re citing in the way they discovered was correct, rather than just the way I instructed them.
(My handout is attached).