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7th grade · English Language Arts · Unit 11 of 13

Research Skills

Primary sources, credibility and citations

What your child practices

Children practice primary and secondary sources, conflicts of interest, focused searches, checking AI answers and online images, quoting, paraphrasing and citing.

Maine Learning Results learning standard: Writing 1 · primary and secondary sources, focused searches, quoting and citing

How we explain it

Children can open this short lesson before they practice.

  1. Check credibility: what are the author’s qualifications? Is there a conflict of interest?
  2. Keep a research log of questions, sources and findings.
  3. Quote and paraphrase carefully, check AI answers and list all sources on a works cited page.

Example: An article reviewing a product was written by the company that sells it. What is this? The writer gains if you buy. That makes the review less fair. Answer: conflict of interest

Research Skills in Maine

In the Maine Learning Results, this is unit 11 of 13 in 7th grade English Language Arts, after Roots & Word Parts and before Framing the Message.

Gradelings describes a child's practice on this unit as Beginning, Approaching, Meeting or Exceeding (Four practice steps). That reflects practice, not a report-card mark: the teacher decides the mark.

Source: Maine Department of Education

Sample questions

A taste of this unit. In the app, questions change every time and get easier or harder to match your child.

  1. Question 1

    Which is the best research question for a report?

    • Is wind nice?
    • Do I like wind?
    • How do wind farms affect local bird populations?
    • Wind farms

  2. Question 2

    Why might an image found online not be what it claims to be?

    • images are always captioned correctly
    • images are primary sources
    • it could be edited, AI-made or from a different event
    • images never change

  3. Question 3

    What does it mean to evaluate a source?

    • count its words
    • read only its title
    • judge how accurate, credible and useful it is
    • copy it

  4. Question 4

    Which search is likely to give the most focused results?

    • "monarch butterfly" migration Mexico
    • bugs that fly
    • butterflies
    • interesting animals

  5. Question 5

    You paraphrase a source but leave out the citation. What have you done?

    • cited
    • corroborated
    • plagiarized
    • summarized correctly

  6. Question 6

    A source is credible but from 1995. When is that a problem?

    • when the topic has changed a lot since then
    • always
    • never
    • only if it is long

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