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Children and young people are naturally curious; a trait that favours the development of documentary assignments and learning. However, these projects sometimes are considered demotivating and complex tasks.
How to motivate them? Things to bear in mind:
· Vary activities according to their age, relating them to their main interests and linking school subjects with their reality.
· Use an active and participatory methodology, where they are responsible for their own learning.
· Use the dynamic of games to encourage them to search for information following their natural tendency to explore and to satisfy their curiosity.
· Foster teamwork to encourage knowledge-sharing, exchange of ideas and opinions that have a social dimension.
· Use resources to capture their attention and to boost learning. Humour, mystery or the search as a challenge work as pull factors.
Steps to take in a research study.
Writing a documentary assignment helps children and young people acquire search, retrieval, analysis and information processing skills.
It is carried out in successive steps that address the following issues:
1. Approach: What do we want to research? How are we going to present it?
- Choose a topic of interest on which information can be obtained relatively easily and set limits to delimit it, which may be geographical, temporal, etc.
- Check for children’s prior knowledge of the issue and establish with them the keywords to start searching for information.
- Offer several possibilities and creative alternatives to present it: a file, a bulleting board, a newspaper, a blog, a sound recording, etc...
2. Resources: Where can we look for?
- Present a wide selection of documentary materials in different devices: encyclopaedias and dictionaries, newspapers and magazines, informational books, CDs, digital objects that you can find on the Net...
- Display the particular characteristics of each resource, highlighting the type of information that can be found and how it is organized.
- Identify the most appropriate documents to research the selected topic.
3. Information: What do we select? And how do we process it?
- Help them to collect information depending on the approach to work.
- Ask them to read carefully the documentation to take notes, organize data, analyze and evaluate the contents, ensuring that they identify what is essential and that the overall content is coherent.
- Ask then to reformulate the final content adding their knowledge and ideas to the selected information.
- Adapt with them the final result to the chosen presentation. The information should be presented in a manner that is suitable for the format: a magazine, a video, an oral or multimedia presentation, etc...
And remember...
When you present a documentary assignment, think of children or young persons as "explorers" who begin an uncertain journey in which to face some challenges, overcome obstacles and discover clues that will lead them to the ultimate goal.
This experience can be a useful working method to transform information into knowledge. |
