The Student as Researcher

 

When assigning students the role as a researcher, there are foreseeable positives and negatives. As a benefit, I can see the student who is assigned to be the class researcher to develop mastery of the material so that their peers can have great research to learn from. On the flip side, I can imagine that some students may not want to take the time to do thorough research as it may be extensive and time consuming. If the student assigned does not do much research and simply does a short summary of what they read, they are still completing the assignment, but not in a way that will be beneficial to them nor their peers. 

If I assigned an assessment where students had access to the internet, I would have the questions be short answer rather than multiple choice. This way, it shows the students have mastery of the subject or understand the subject rather than being able to Google search the answer. Some short answer questions could also be opinion based. For example, my planned content area is English Language Arts, I could ask how the students think the story would have changed if a character acted differently in a main area of the book. This way the students have to think, elaborate on the topic, and again, cannot find it by simply typing an answer into a search bar.