8 Tips for Facilitating Ethical Research Practices in the ELA Classroom

I’ve been teaching research for my entire career. It began horribly, and honestly, it was because I was downright lazy. I demanded citations for everything but did little to teach my students how to make them. More importantly, I never instructed them why ethical research was important.
After a few years of surviving gaining experience, I began doing more to help my students facilitate research. I gave handouts, we made works cited pages in class, I bookmarked the OWL Purdue Writing Lab on my computer multiple times. My students began to learn that research was necessary, but still didn’t really understand why it was important.

A few years ago, I did an overhaul of the way I taught writing in my classes, inspired by Kelly Gallagher’s brilliant book, Write Like This. One of the things I took away was presenting students with reasons for why they write, and that applies to research as well. I began to emphasize the importance of conducting ethical research, and for finding ways to make it easier for high school students to do it.

After some reflection, decided that my students needed writing help, led by someone willing to do and know the research. I created a Writing Center (which sadly closed two years later because of funding) and became aggressive about teaching research strategies. I worked to create countless MLA and ethical research resources for instruction––all of which are available in my TpT store.

Here are some tips I have for improving students’ adherence to ethical research practices and teaching them easily and efficiently.

Apply Real-World Applications

One my favorite research assignments is our sophomore career paper. All sophomores, honors and on-level students, complete this project, where they select a career and research it. The unit begins with a variety of self-assessments, including the Myers-Briggs test and several career quizzes. Students then research all components of their chosen career and reflect on what they’re learning about as they go.

It sounds hard to believe, but every year my students admit that they love this assignment. We’re working on it right now in my classroom and one student looked up at me and said, “I just wrote two pages. I’ve never written that much that quickly in my life!” She explained that because she was writing about something she was already curious about, she didn’t notice the work behind the process.

I recently posted my career research paper unit to my TpT store, which is a no-prep resource for any 9-12 grade ELA classroom!

Approach Works Cited Pages Like an Index

In my 16 years of experience, I’ve learned that students hate MLA. It’s really no offense to the Modern Language Association; students just don’t understand its purpose. Most feel like they can just put “ESPN” after a paragraph from that website and call it day. I mean, who’s going to check it, right?

But unfortunately, we research under the assumption that people will check our sources. It sometimes helps to show students serious scholarly articles that require extensive research and copious notes in order to make a clear and ethical point.

Many students don’t understand why they must cite by author or web page title (when there’s not author) rather than website. One way I explain this distinction is to treat the Works Cited like an index. It’s why the Works Cited Page is formatted in a hanging indent (see section on formatting later). The first item, the most crucial information in a citation, juts off the page for indexing purposes. This is the item that goes in an in-text citation, so you can easily cross-reference between in-text citations and the works cited page.

Embrace the Nerdiness

In a search to add some humor to my classroom, (ok, to be honest, I fell down a Pinterest path and discovered memes), I found this meme about the Credible Hulk. After laughing for an inappropriate amount of time, I posted it in my classroom. Later, I put it on the cover of my MLA Citation Guide. You see, I can hand out Citation Guides till the cows come home, but they sound boring. But since I started calling him the Credible Hulk, students remember what to call it and don’t mind using it in public.

Teach Bookending

When teaching my career paper unit, my students struggle with taking long portions of research from a single website and using it over the course of an entire paragraph. While we’d love to just put a citation at the end of a paragraph, this is not the proper practice of ethical research. This introduces the act of bookending, where you introduce a source, cite its immediate source, and continue the cycle over and over again.

My Source Integration unit includes resources on introducing sources, citing them properly, and using bookending over the course of a paragraph. It is for purchase on Teachers Pay Teachers through this link.

Formatting is Harder Than You Think

I recently had a discussion with a student that was continually giving me sloppy Works Cited pages. After the third failed draft, I asked him if he understood that the capitalization, italics, quotation marks, punctuation, and other formatting were actual rules. He admitted that no, he didn’t know that. According to him (and sadly, many other students), things that I understand as formatting are often interpreted as being optional or even “fancy,” in their words.

Have you ever wondered why students rarely use proper capitalization or even spelling in their texts? I had a student (one who got a 5 on the AP Lit exam) explain that to follow those rules in texting makes it look like she’s “trying too hard.”

As illogical or upsetting as that is, it finally clicked for me. I needed to explain the reasons for the formatting rules, otherwise they are just interpreted as “fancy” embellishments that can be ignored. Working these details into a rubric can help students understand the difference between requirements and suggestions.

Practice in Class

Another suggestion for mastering ethical research is to do as much of it in class as you can. For our first research assignment, I model how to sort a strong source from a poor one, looking for dates, authors’ credentials, and publication transparency. I also require students to take notes on each source on research source cards (a free download from my TpT store with over 13,000 downloads!). Once they’ve completed that, we write our citations and our entire works cited page in class together.

This can take a lot of time, but I’ve found the more time I put into it at the beginning of the year, the less time it takes to teach later on. Furthermore, students master the skills better with the slow and steady approach. Some even come back and ask for source cards for other classes because they find the process so helpful.

Use Plagiarism Checkers as a Tool–Not a Weapon

Most high school ELA teachers are familiar with plagiarism checkers like Turnitin.com. I’ve been using Turnitin for years and like its features, for the most part. However, I’ve discovered that I use it very differently than some other teachers.

One teacher at my school tells students that as long as their originality percentage is less than 20% they’ll be fine. He doesn’t exclude quotes, so that can be a real fear for some research assignments. I, on the other hand, do not give students a “safe” percentage. I’ve seen papers that plagiarize at only 8% and others that get marked at over 30% and they’re totally fine. I do, however, allow students to see their originality reports immediately after submitting. I also allow them to resubmit as many times as they want before the due date.

While some teachers will argue that this allows students to find ways to avoid getting caught, I prefer to look at it as a way to help students learn what they’re doing wrong––and fix it without penalty. I still have students who plagiarize, and justly get punished, but fewer instances were students cite incorrectly and find out too late.

Use Praise to Build Editors

During writing units, I always take time to build up students who do something right. We all have students who are stellar writers. No matter what you throw at them, they’ll be amazing. I usually use their essays as sample papers the following year (with their names removed).

But I’m not talking about just praising your top writers. Take time to lift up students who are mediocre writers, but do something really great. I recently praised one mid-level writer who had a creative attention-getter, asking him to read it aloud in class. When his classmates praised him, I could visibly see him light up. He used that energy to work even harder on the rest of his introduction paragraph.

I also like to write down the names of students who are mastering citations or bookending in the early stages of drafting. At the end of each class, I read off their names and praise them for their understanding of the skill. My motivation for doing this is slightly self-serving, I’ll admit. Not only does it give them a confidence boost, but it tells other students that they can ask that peer for help if I’m overloaded or unavailable (resulting in less work for me!).

In Conclusion…

I hope some of these strategies and resources can help you teach research skills more efficiently and clearly. I believe that building strong researchers ensures a more honest and hard-working student body entering universities, and eventually the workforce.