By now teachers are thinking of ways and strategies to deal with teaching research. Research being an applied subject in the senior high school curriculum, it develops the inquisitive aspect by conducting a research that in a way enhances student’s critical thinking, a skill that we need to develop in our students so they can be better individuals in the future. This is also side by side with their skills in information and communication.
Research being a serious and laborious if not the most dreadful subject in senior high school where most students have had difficulty to finish the research process given the entire semester to complete or even had problem of beating the deadline for presentation. The final weeks before the end of the semester are usually gruesome for the students and so oftentimes leaving behind the requirements of other subjects.
But the Covid-19 pandemic has in a way pushed our students to utilize what technology has to offer. Specifically information technology has paved the way for students to make their academic life bearable. And so introducing these research technological tools would allow students to conduct research as easy that they have not imagined before.
Electronic digital computers at first simply replaced earlier technologies. Researchers used computers to do arithmetic calculations previously done with paper and pencil, slide rules, abacuses, or roomfuls of people running mechanical calculators.
Briefly, I will present few enabling ways, technologies and tools that for sure would make the research undertaking of our students relevant and meaningful.
Let’s start with a big one: Google Scholar. This online research tool is offered for free by Google and is indispensable for any serious researcher. Armed with nothing more than a computer, an internet connection, and a subject for research, Google Scholar will give you a head start on any project. An academic search engine that allows its users to search all manner of academic literature from journals and white papers to scientific articles and patents. Granted, there are other sites that offer a similar facility, but it’s the scope of Google Scholar’s service that makes it stand out. Not only does it search the best-known databases for academic papers, but it also has access to a slew of university repositories. This increases the chance of finding something relevant to your own research.
Furthermore, the Google Scholar search facility allows you to set up an alert. This will notify you should a new article or paper be released in your particular field, or from a particular person or institution. This ensures that your research remains on the cutting edge of your field.
Still from Google is the Google forms, a very popular feature of Google that allows students to conduct a survey. This guides the student researchers to create a questionnaire and formulate questions relevant to the research topic.
After collecting data, the need comes to turn them into useful information and so we are seeking the assistance of tools for data analysis. However, the internet offers a lot of data analysis applications without us realizing that the Microsoft Excel is a really common application that we used ever since that we did not optimize its use when it comes to data analysis.
Excel can be used with any piece of Microsoft Office software. Its broad range of capabilities ranging from simple computation of mean , median , mode, standard deviation to supporting programming via Visual Basic Application which allows manipulation of spreadsheets. It enables the display of results of the analysis in line graphs, charts and histograms type. Basic visualization can be produced from specific group of cells.
Next is the writing phase, a major part of the research undertaking. Constructing words, phrases and sentences to make come up with meaningful thoughts is equally daunting at this stage. But there is a tool that can do it for you. Paraphrase any single sentence or paragraph? QuillBot is the answer, a paraphrasing and summarizing tool which uses machine learning to reword, restructure or summarize selected text. It functions like a thesaurus in full sentence: users only right-click a phrase and press 'Quill It' to rephrase the word. Users can then edit the output of the side panel output and place it inside their text.
The list does not stop here. There are still more research tools to choose from. Much like the rudiment of research, to promote the process and lessen complexity, it takes to develop a mindset of inquisitiveness and resourcefulness. Due to digital tools that make it less complicated yet meaningful, research could never be as tedious as before.