Welcome to Inquiry: 101

I created this blog for reference librarians and college professors who are looking for new ways to improve their students' research skills. Inquiry:101, the lesson plan described in this blog, provides you with a framework for teaching first-year history students to craft effective research questions, select possible search terms related to those questions, identify the types of information they need to address their questions, and find potential sources of that information.

If you are a first-time visitor to this blog, click on "The Need" section. There you will read about how I came to develop this lesson plan and the library instruction and educational research that informed that process. "The Plan" section will provide you with an overview on Dr. Thanh Nguyen's Teaching In an Open World instructional design model, upon which this lesson is bassed. 

"The Goals" page lists the three goals of this lesson and the three outcomes associated with each of those goals. The numbered goals pages feature detailed lesson plans that will give you the tools you need to help your students achieve each of the three goals. Additionally, the "Standards" page provides information about the Association of College and Research Library Information Literacy Competency Standards associated with the three goals, the "Assessment" page provides rubrics for the summative assessment of each of those three goals and the works cited in the development of this plan can be found in the "References" section.

Thanks for visiting. Please feel free to post any questions or comments.

Inquiry:101's Mission Statement

The mission of this lesson is to provide students with the wide range of skills needed to craft an effective research question – a query which examines the relationship between variables and be answered through analysis of data. The research question will inform the entire research process and help students identify their search terms and the resources they should examine.  It's understood that as the research process progresses, the student's research question might change based upon the new information they incorporate into their knowledge base. Faced with an information glut, these skills will enable students to find the data most suitable to answer any of their questions – those posed inside and outside the classroom.