English Career Resources
Research
Introduction
End task – write to inform and explain
Setting the ground rules
for the writing
Independent research
Fact and opinion
Different texts make for different versions of reality
Interim presentations
Useful acronym's KWL
and QuADS frameworks
Detecting bias
Provenance
Getting it onto paper
Critical evaluation
End task – write to inform and explain
Setting the ground rules
for the writing
Independent research
Fact and opinion
Different texts make for different versions of reality
Interim presentations
Useful acronym's KWL
and QuADS frameworks
Detecting bias
Provenance
Getting it onto paper
Critical evaluation
Research
Key Stage 4: Research
End task – write to inform and explain
It is a truism that competence and attainment in reading are best demonstrated by requiring students to do something with texts rather than simply answering questions. In this case study, students are given the end task at the outset:
'By Y11 teenagers are expected to begin to make career decisions which can affect the rest of their working lives. Write an article for a careers magazine which is part of a series aiming at providing a detailed picture of an aspect of a career. The series' title is: "Warts and all" and the aim is to give the reader information about a career which goes beyond the officially promoted view of it. Articles which balance positive and negative aspects of the career will be most highly rewarded.'
Students will find this assignment sheet useful as it will remind them of them of the purpose this work:
Background:
You work as a trainee journalist on a careers magazine which is distributed free to all secondary schools in the UK.
The magazine specialises in giving school students accurate information about all sorts of careers.
You have been working on a series of articles which give a balanced picture of different careers. 'Balance' means that you aim to include different people's opinions about the work. In other words, you will be using information which does not just come from the people who are recruiting for that career. You will be looking for facts and opinions from people who actually do the job. This means doing some research.
Research is not just a matter of going on the internet and cutting and pasting tons of information. You need to make sure that what you collect is relevant. This will – in turn – mean you will first of all have to decide what you want to find out. Writing down a list of questions will help with this.
Once you have collected the information, you will need to think about the best way of presenting it. Begin by looking at other magazines for ideas about layout. Make sure that you include lots of quotations from different sources – you do this by putting the quote inside speech marks and by showing where you got the information from.
As you work, keep asking yourself: Can I trust this source of information? Because choosing your career is one of the most important things you will do in life and you want to use the best information to do this.