High School Research Assignments

This is a great place to start high school students writing fact based research essay. The steps below can work for any topic, but here is a topic you can start with, if you wish.

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Research Question: How did Ivan Pavlov's experiments with dogs demonstrate that human behavior could be changed using conditioning? What kind of dog was Pavlov's dog? What is the Pavlov Theory? Explain classical conditioning.

Steps to writing a fact based essay:

1. Analyze the essay questions. Make sure you understand what they are asking, and therefore what the teacher is expecting to be included in the essay.
2. Research your topic thoroughly and find studies that support your ideas. Take detailed notes while doing research. Look for information in different types of sources including books and journal articles. Don't rely just on what you can find online.
3. Create a reference list. Find out what style your teacher is expecting for your sources or reference page. Include all the sources you have used in your research.
4. Create an outline. I always require my students to include the outline with their paper. A good outline will help your student to structure his information and save him a lot of time when he starts to write.
5. Write a strong thesis statement. A thesis statement usually appears at the beginning of paper, in the introductory paragraph. It is usually one sentence tha offers a concise summary of the main point or claim of the essay or research paper. 
6. Write your first draft, including all in-text citations.
7. Proofread and edit the essay. Check grammar, spelling, structure of the essay and quality of the ideas.
8. Revise and review the first draft. Refine your argument and make improvements to content. Correct any spelling and grammar mistakes you found while proofreading.
9. Turn in your first draft to your teacher. Once you go to college you will need to have a friend, classmate, older sibling or a parent to do this step for you, which is to read and review your essay for content, structure, grammatical and spelling errors you have missed. Consider this feedback seriously and make revisions.
10. Prepare the final draft to your teacher's specifications, including page requirements, style requirements and whether or not a title page or table of contents is required. Make sure you understand when the due date is so that you can pace yourself accordingly.

Research Extras:

• This article on the APA website describes how some college students figured out who "Little Albert" really was and what happened after the famous (infamous) conditioning experiment.

• Try your hand at conditioning Pavlov's Dog in this animation on the Nobel Prize site.

The Multi-Paragraph Report

The beginning research multi-paragraph report is often called the 5-paragraph essay or report because it has an introductory paragraph, three paragraphs covering three parts of the essay and then a concluding paragraph. It is a formula which doesn't necessarily work for advanced papers as not all subjects have three divisions, but it good for beginning writer. So, for this first paper, have your student pick a topic he really likes that can be divided into three parts. Make sure it is a topic if of his own choice.

Now, take a trip to the library and have your student check out one few books from the library on the topic of choice. Have him look through the books he has checked out to find the one that is the most suitable.  

Have your student read the book and write an outline, using the chapter titles as the main headings. Look at what he has written together and have a discussion about what he has learned from his studies and what direction he wants to take with his report. Can the report be organized around the three topics he had originally thought of? 

Now, have your student complete additional research. Have your student use his original resource, and also three or four internet sites and additional books as needed and find quotes that would work in his report. On index cards, have your student write each quote and at the end, cite, for books,  the name of the book, author, date of publication, publisher and date of publication. For for each internet site, cite name of article, name of website, author or organization  and web address. 

In addition to the quotes, have your student summarize chapters or sections from the books and websites in order to provide the necessary information for the report. Make sure this is hand written and have your student cite the book or website he used for the summary to avoid plagerism.

Now he can organize the index cards in piles according to the topic divisions. Some students can work from the piles to organize their paper, but others will need to use a graphic organizer to keep the ideas in order. And still other students will need to turn that graphic organizer into a final outline.

Before he begins writing, however have him create a works cited page, listing all the materials he has used to create his outline. Using the citation format he used on the index cards, he needs to cite all of the materials he used alphabetized by author’s last name or website name write a reference list. 

Using whatever organizational tools the student needs, now it is time for him to start writing the paper. He should begin with writing the introduction paragraph for the paper. Since he has had practice writing paragraphs, he should be able to do this, but you may want to remind him or guide him to start with a sentence that introduces the topic of the paper, but also grabs the readers' attention. He then could state why he is studying the subject or what the paper will cover. He can end the paragraph with a concluding sentence. Anytime he refers to any of the materials he used in his research,  whether it be a direct quotation, a paraphrase or a summary, he needs to follow it by a number which will match up to the works cited page once he has finished writing the paper.

Now following the organization of the piles of index cards, the graphic organizer or the outline, have your student write at least one paragraph but no more than one page on each of the three topics of his report. 

Now, it is time for your student to write a conclusion paragraph. If your student has difficulty writing this paragraph, you can help him through it by telling him to write a sentence that states what the paper discussed (referring to the topics mentioned in the introductory paragraph.) Next, tell him to write a few sentences stating his opinions or a call to action. 

Print out a copy of the paper, and read it over together. Circle spelling or grammar errors, but do not be too discouraging if there are many errors. Note the most important ones, and save the other errors to address in future papers. There is time to correct mistakes. Make sure there are citations at the end of each paragraph. 

Have him make changes and print a final draft.

Sources and Resources:

• Essay Writing for Reluctant High School Writers,7 Sisters Homeschool
• Essay Writing: Simple Ways To Help Your Child Improve Their Essay Writing, Integrated Learning Strategies Learning Corner
• Five Paragraph Essays, Layers of Learning
• The Five-Paragraph Essay: What, Why, and How for Homeschoolers, Annie and Everything
• Writing a Research Paper PORTFOLIO: Grades 8-12
• How to Write an Essay in 5 Easy Steps,Union Test Prep Blog

Beginning Writing : Summarizing, Annotating, Paraphrasing, Quoting and Plagiarism

What is the difference between summarizing, annotating, paraphrasing and quoting from a text and how can you help to prevent your student from plagiarizing?

Summary

A summary is the main idea of a text put into the student's own words. Begin by asking your student, "what is the text about?" My students sometimes found it helpful to circle the key words first before writing their summary. Book report writing is a good way of using summaries.

Annotating

Annotating is a type of summary that also includes the student's own opinions about the text. To begin helping the student begin writing an annotated bibliography, have him include in his summaries of the texts he is going to use for a paper and the reasons why the each text would be good for his report or why support what he is saying in his report or whether the text is faulty in some way.

Paraphrase

A paraphrase is a shorter, more condensed form of the entire section of a text put into the student's own words. Your student will want to paraphrase, as an alternative to a direct quotation, to support his claims or provide evidence for his writing. He must use different vocabulary but retain the same meaning of the original text. Make sure your student doesn't just use synonyms but also changes the order of the words and/or uses a different grammatical structure. Also, make sure he doesn't change the meaning of the text by adding his own views.

The easiest way to prepare a text for paraphrasing is to first number the paragraphs so that they can be referred to easily. Next teach your student to underline and circle portions of the text with purpose. Depending on what he is planning to use the paraphrase for, he can underline claims or points to support an argument he wants to make within a paper or he can underline imagery within a poem. He can circle key terms. He will then need to use his markings to write his own paraphrase of the text he has chosen to use.

Quotation

A quotation is a word-for-word section of a text in which your student begins and ends with quotation marks. Teach your student the four ways to use a quotation : 1) introduce the quotation with a complete sentence followed by a colon. 2) introduce a quotation with a explanatory phrase followed by a comma, 3) write a sentence using only short quotes. 4) introduce a quote by paraphrasing it first. I usually begin by suggesting that the student introduce the quote, add the quote and then explain the v quote or why it is in the paper.

Plagiarism

For all of these types of writing, your student needs to cite everything that is in his paper that is not common knowledge. For his first writings, he can just cite the book's name and author's name and the page of the text he is referring to. He can add to this as his papers become more complex until he is using a MLA or APA citation format.

Beginning Writing : Making an Outline

This is the first draft of an outline my son James made. Later versions contained Roman numerals and letters to differentiate the levels of information. Using just Arabic numerals can make an outline confusing.

Making an outline is one of those skills that I  teach in several different ways before expecting them to create one on their own. They can then learn how making outlines can be used as supporting skills for larger projects such as a research paper.

I start teaching my students about outlines by writing them on the board as we go through a history or science lesson. They can easily learn the structure of going from the main topic to supporting topics and the use of numbers and letters. Start out simple with just a topic sentence or phrase which you number with a Roman numeral. Then add supporting sentences below, indenting and labeling each with a capital. Build as you go, including Arabic numerals and lowercase letters and further indenting, letting them know why you have added anything new as you do so. Learning this structure can begin at a very young age and it only takes a minute or less to explain.

Once you have shown the outline format for some time, have your student begin copying the outlines in his history and science notebooks as part of their copywork. Don't be surprised, especially if your student suffers from lack of executive functioning skills, that your student will suddenly and inextricably be unable to write it just like it is written on the board, even though they can apparently read them. Just remind them of the formula.

Next, have your student begin making his own outlines. I usually use their history or science texts for this,  but you could use anything as long as it has clear topic sentences and supporting information. Have them make simple outlines at first, and don't move on to expecting more complicated outlines until Middle School. Sometimes students will transition to more complicated outlines on their own. For his first couple of outlines, he can copy the information word for word from the text, because he needs to be able to focus his attention on the format. For these outlines, have him cite where he obtained his information at the end of the outline with the words "taken from" and then citing the tile and author of the book, so that he begins to learn that using someone else's words without proper citation is plagiarism. Explain that in an actual report if he uses someone else's words he must use quotation marks. As soon as he can, have him begin writing the outline in his own words. He still needs to cite the source, by stating the title and author of the book used at the bottom.

Once he becomes comfortable with writing his own simple outline, he can begin writing his own short one page paper, which is really more a summary or paraphrasing of the text than a paper. These summaries/paraphrases will get larger as the outlining becomes more complicated.

Once he masters this type of outlining, you will want to help him learn the new skill of creating notes from a lecture. As you give a history or science lesson, pause after you have given them a bit of information and then ask them to tell you back what was the main topic and what were some supporting topics you have just told them. Help them through making an outline by writing his responses on a white board for him. Once he is able to do this, have him come up and outline the material himself. You can lengthen the amount of material and transition him to making the outline in his notebook instead of on the board.

Once he masters these steps, he will have some of the skills he needs in order to create an outline for a multi-sources research paper, but first let's focus a bit on summarizing, paraphrasing and quoting (what are the differences between them and how to avoid plagiarism) which is the topic of my next beginning writing post.

Beginning Writing : Writing Paragraphs

After your students can write a good sentence, it is time to introduce paragraph writing. This is something that can be taught in the elementary years, but should also be reviewed as they get older and the paragraphs get more complex.  Whether simple or complex, paragraph construction has a certain structure that can be taught.

Paragraph Structure. Every paragraph begins with a topic sentence, which relays the main idea of the sentence. The next sentences, which form the body of the paragraph, are the supporting sentences. For the beginning writer,  the sentences can all just be supporting details. As the student's paragraph writing gets more sophisticated, the supporting sentences can provide textural evidence or a detail and then examples or explanations of the detail. The paragraph then ends with a concluding sentence that wraps up the paragraph and refers back to the topic sentence.

Mentoring paragraphs.  Just as we worked with mentoring sentences to learn sentence writing, we work with mentoring paragraphs to learn how to write paragraphs.  Find good, solid paragraphs in literature, science or history texts to use. Have them get small post-it notes to label the parts of the paragraph. Alternatively, you can provide the student with a copy of a paragraph so that he can write directly on the page. He can identify the parts of the paragraph using differently colored highlighters. This is the beginning foundation of annotation, which we will discuss in detail in another post.

Paragraph Puzzles. Another way to have students work with paragraph construction is for them have the separate sentences of a paragraph before them and they have to order them into a cohesive paragraph. You can do this by typing out the sentences of a good paragraph and then cutting them out for him to reassemble.

Supported Paragraph Writing. For the first paragraph I have my students write, I choose a topic that relates to a current or recent area of study, usually in their science or history studies (although I add literature as well.) I will write the topic sentence on a whiteboard that addresses the topic. I have my student then brainstorm on a piece of paper a list of information that would support the topic sentence. For the first time or even the first few times, I will conclude the lesson there. Once he feels confident in making these lists, he can then move on to writing supporting details for each of bits of information he has listed for a topic. Once he becomes proficient in this step, he can begin to write a paragraph on a topic, using the lists he can generate as a skeletal outline. (I will post more about making outlines later.) At this point, your student may need help by your illuminating irrelevant supporting details, but be gentle and helpful with this. Do not seem as if you are correcting the piece, but more like you are guiding. In other words, if he insists on keeping details that you feel are irrelevant, let it go. He will get better over time.

Writing the Topic Sentence. Give your student short answer questions taken from his history and science studies. Make sure he always starts by generating a list. Then, teach him how to restate part of the question and then how to add to it to form the topic sentence of the answer paragraph. He then can provide evidence for the answer, by the details he adds to the paragraph from his information lists. You can also begin teaching transition words or phrases such as first, next and finally.

Writing a Concluding Sentence.  I save the teaching of this until after the student has written some from brainstorming outlines because I have found that concluding sentences are the trickiest part of paragraphs for students to master. They have to learn how to refer to the topic sentence but at the same time making it a different and, hopefully, strong sentence. Be sure to look at pairs of topic and concluding sentences thoroughly before having him attempt to write one himself. You can look back at the paragraphs he has annotated for this.

Practicing. With this background, now your student just needs lots of practice. You can begin giving him daily opportunities to write across the various subjects he studies. As he does this, you can gently teach the areas in which he is weak, such as elaborating, improving word choice by using active verbs or synonyms or strengthening transitions. Once he has done this for some time, he will be ready for a multi-paragraph report.

Beginning Writing: Sentence Writing

 

While you are still getting your student to write lists, but when you feel that they are soon ready to move on, begin working on sentence writing. Again, this is for students of all ages, from elementary to high school level. The example sentences and your expectations for your student may be different according to their grade or age level, but the process is essentially the same. This process has to be done over and over again, revising it from time to time, incrementally more complex. The idea is to mentor your students, not either feeding them answers nor testing them to see if they understand with a sea of writing assignments that end up being filled with red marks. That is why this process is often called, "mentor sentences" but the process is not new as Charlotte Mason wrote about these concepts in the late 19th century. However you want to look at it, the essential steps are as follows:

1. You will need to find a sentence in a good book that you want to use as your example sentence. These sentences can be the beginnings of a commonplace book. Alternatively,  you can write your own sentences.

2. You and your student look at the sentence,  noting things that make it an exceptional sentence. You may have something you have been working on that you may bring to his attention, but you might also want to introduce other concepts that you are planning on working on later. In schools this step is sometimes left to the students to figure out because of the idea that a student will remember a concept better if he discovers it himself.  It is also used in group settings in order to assess the knowledge level of each of the students. I have never found that method to be good as either a learning or assessment tool in homeschooling,  so I  guide him through this step. Don't be afraid of giving him too much because you are giving him the tools right now, not testing him.

3. Di-sect the sentence, looking at the grammar and/or punctuation. Review the concepts he already knows. Introduce a concept that the sentence uses. Think about this step when you pick your sentence to use.

4. Once you have thoroughly gone through the sentence, word by word, you can give the sentence for dictation. For younger students, you can print out the sentence, cut the words out separately, and have your student rebuild the sentence instead.

5. Now that he is very familiar with the model sentence,  he can play with the words in the sentence. What are some synonyms for some of the words used? Getting out a thesaurus can be fun. How about rearranging the words in the sentence? How about starting the sentence off with a dependent clause? How do the manipulations change the sentence? Do they make the sentence more exciting or more clear or does it change the meaning of the sentence? Take as much time with this step as you can for much can be learned by sentence manipulating.

6. Can your student now write a different but similar sentence? Change the subject of the sentence, or perhaps the predicate, or both. This is the step where you can really begin to see the rewards for all the efforts you both have put into this.

7. Armed with what your student has learned,  can he now go back and rewrite some of the lackluster sentences he has written in the past? Help him by picking out a sentence or two from his previous work that you feel lends itself to this editing. Encourage him to approach this step not as fixing something that is broken, but as an exciting application of what he has learned - a "now we can do this" attitude.  Do not use any red pens or anything that strikes one as correction. This should be fun.

8. Now it is time to start the process with another concept and another sentence.

Resources:

• Ideas by Jivey has a good post called Step by Step: The Why and How of Mentor Sentences.
• Buzzing with Mrs B has a good packet called Mentor Sentences Grammar Notebook that uses a similar method.
• Teaching My Friends! has an interesting  post about manipulating sentences called Crafting Power Sentences, in which she uses a chart to break down the words in the sentence.
• Making Meaning with Melissa has a post entitled, Why I use Mentor Sentences to Teach Writing in my High School English Classroom.

Beginning Writing: Start by Making Lists

Whether your child is struggling with writing because he is young and new at it or its because he is older and had bad experiences that have made him reluctant to write, you can begin at a simple starting point and work slowly, step-by-step until he is writing reports, papers and essays.

It all begins by making a list.

It can be a list of any sort. Have him make lots of them. About anything that interests him. Perhaps you can give him a topic once in awhile. Make lists from the other subjects he is taking such as science or history. Then it can count for two subjects and make your student very happy. Slowly begin to ask him to add in some organization to his list making. He could list his ten favorite cars in order from the best down to his tenth favorite. He could list the colors in a rainbow in order and then list a flower that is of each of the colors. He could list how he plays a particular game in likes to play in the order it is played (what do you do first, and so on). Have the ordering be in as many different ways as you can think of. Help him through any that are difficult for him, by asking questions to guide him.

Once you think he is ready, have him pick one of the lists to use for the next type of writing project, the paragraph, but first let's look at sentence writing.

Teaching Grammar using History and Science Texts

Teaching Grammar using History and Science Texts

I have mentioned before what grammar topics we have been working on, such as nouns or verbs, but I haven't written much about how we are learning about them. During my planning time prior to the start of the start of a new school year, I jot down some English grammar and punctuation concepts I want them to learn (or review) the coming year. 

Our lesson on common and proper nouns from our history study of Mesopotamia. These lists were later used to help them write their narrations.

Often I will have down the same part of speech for both of the younger boys, such as verbs, but I will take the concepts to a more complicated level for my 6th grader than for my 4th grader. For example, if the part of speech we are going to look at this week is verbs, I may go over with the both of them conjugating present, past and past participle verbs or singular and plural forms of verbs or the difference between helping and linking verbs. For James, I would also include irregular verbs and often misused verbs, or subject-verb agreement.

How do we do this?

• Look at a current passage in our history or science lesson for grammar lesson material.

Whatever concept we are going over for the day, we look for in our history and/or science texts. For example, for verb tenses, we would search for verbs in our history text, and then I would ask them to write down the present, past and future tenses of the verbs in columns. From the First City States section of The Ancient World, we found these verbs: swelled, flooded, trapping, irrigate, carry, covered, stayed and lived.  We wrote them down in a list form and looked at them. We noted that most of the verbs were in their past tense form, which makes sense for a history text. I then made a chart for them to fill in, with the headings Present, Past and Past Participle. I then had them tell me the form of each of the verbs and put them in the proper column. Then they were to tell me the other forms for that verb, to complete the chart. For example, for the word swelled, they told me that this was the past form of the verb swell, and they filled it in under the past column. They then filled in swells under the present column and has swollen under the past participle column. They did this for each of the verbs.

• Pick out a sentence for copywork.

You pick out a sentence or two (or more) from their history or science texts that illustrates the concepts you have been working on. Each week I usually have them working on one grammatical and one punctuation concept. For this piece, you will make sure that they correctly accomplish whatever grammatical or punctuation concepts you are working on. Do not work on everything at once, however tempting this may be. You can expect them to maintain any concepts you have been over in the previous lessons as well as the current concepts you are working on, but do not expect them to get them all every time. Sometimes there is a lot for them to remember all at once. If they consistently drop a past concept, I know we need to review this again.

• Have them complete a narration at the end of the week, and hold them responsible for the concepts learned. 

Often I will help them with their narrations with outlines they have taken from their texts while working on the grammatical concepts. For example, I gave them the list of verbs we had generated in order to make a narration for the First City States. This reinforces the grammatical concepts and gives them a place to start, so they are not starting cold on their narrations. A blank page can be scary, but it is less scary with a list of verbs for a crutch to fall back on.

• Writing to practice concepts learned.

Sometimes I will give them writing assignments to practice the concepts they have just learned to answer the question of whether they have internalized the concepts and can apply them to other pieces of their writing. These can be anything from a general knowledge question to a review from last year question to a creative writing piece. For example, one of these might be their assignment for the week.

• Write about 6 things you like to do in your spare time.
• Write a definition of the word reflection and tell about at least five places where reflection could appear.
• Write a short story that begins, "While digging under some rotting leaves..."
• Describe a good deed you did for someone, and write about how you felt after you did it.

For any of these, prior to their beginning to write, I remind them of the grammatical concept that we have been working on. For example, I might say, be sure to have strong verbs in their right tenses and not just to-be verbs.

This is how we accomplish our English studies without ever using a grammar worksheet that would just get thrown away at the end of the year. These lessons are something they are proud of as they can see concrete evidence of learning and how their writing has improved as the year goes on.