Activity Purpose:

Help students evaluate sources using information provided by the databases; Students get a chance to practice selection of sources by assessing their relevance to the topic of their papers as well as to the focus of their arguments.

Stage of writing best suited for this activity:

This activity is most useful at the stage where students are ready to commit to a particular topic, and are in the preliminary stages of choosing sources.

Background Knowledge:

This activity assumes that students are already familiar with data base searching and common e-mail commands (such as composing and forwarding messages).

1. Use keywords related to your topic to compose a database search. Narrow down or expand your keywords in order to get a sufficient amount of sources to choose from. This means you should have a selection--and not only the number of sources you will need for your paper.
   
   
2. Once you have found a good number of sources (around 10 to 15) examine the abstracts or summaries available directly through the database to see which of these sources are relevant to your particular focus within your topic.
   
   
3. Find two sources that you will e-mail to YOURSELF. One should be a source you think you are very likely to use, the other should be a source that is somehow related to your topic, but you do not think is useful to your paper.
   
   
4. Go into your e-mail account, and when the two sources you e-mailed arrive, forward them to the teacher; add a message to each forwarded search result to explain if it's the one you will use or not, and why. Try to be as specific as possible when explaining why your think one source is useful for your paper while the other is not.

This document is brought to you by The UW ESL Center. It was created by Naomi Gurevich, in 1996. You are free to distribute this document, or use it in class, as long as you give credit to the source. You may not use this document for any commercial purposes.

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