Online Learning for Information Literacy: Find Sources

Class Exercise: Jigsaw Search Tool Comparison

A jigsaw activity is a cooperative learning technique in which students are depend upon each other to learn material. This exercise could be modified to work either in person or asynchronously online. Divide students into small groups and provide each group with a single database or search tool. You can use the library's Databases A–Z page to collect discipline-specific examples.

Ask groups to spend a few minutes searching for information in their assigned tool. They should also use this time to discuss how the tool is structured to support searches for specific materials or kinds of articles. One easy way to do this is to review the advanced search limiters present on the left side of a database results screen.

Bring the whole class back together to discuss the features of each individual search tool and specific ways it might be used to support their research process.

Class Exercise: Following the Conversation

Provide students with an article you've already assigned or discussed so everyone is familiar with its major findings or argument. During class, ask small groups to review the paper's introduction, pick a few articles it cites (3, 5, or more depending on how long you want the activity to take), and record how the paper uses the older findings or arguments to support the work it will eventually do.

Then ask groups to find articles that cite the paper you provided (Google Scholar and many library databases can help with this) and look to see how the more recent articles describe and use the original findings (using ctrl + f or command + f to search for the author(s) will make this easier). Finally, students should make some sort of graphical representation of how the different articles connect and how the ideas in the article you provided were both inspired by what came before and built upon by what came after.