Lesson: Highlighting Articles

Lesson: Highlighting

Description

The purpose of this lesson is to teach students how to find and highlight the relevant information that answers their research question.

Learning Outcomes I Suggested Procedure I Assessment for this Lesson

Materials for this Offline lesson:

Two copies of the same article for each student

Transparency of article

Overhead projector

Highlighter for each student

Time allotment: 30 minutes

Grade Level: Grade 2 - 12

Information Literacy Standard:
2. The student who is information literate evaluates information critically and competently.

Learning Outcomes

Students will be able to identify key phrases in an article that answer their questions.
Students will be able to discriminate between information that answers their research questions and information that is interesting.
Students will be able to highlight key phrases in their article that answer their questions.

Suggested Procedure

Give each student a simple photocopied article on a topic with a question that needs to be answered written across the top.

Read the article out loud and have students follow along.

Ask students to highlight the information that they think answers this question on the article.

Now tell students that there are 3 or 4 important pieces of information that really answer the question. (You, the teacher, will determine the actual number of important pieces of information based upon the article you select for your class.)

Give students a new sheet and ask them to find the pieces of information that they think answers the question and underline that information with a pencil.
Next, pass out highlighters. Discuss as a class which four pieces of information they think answer the question, arguing and negotiating back and forth, until agreement is reached.

Tell students that they will need to highlight this information but that they will need to highlight phrases (parts of a sentence) instead of the entire sentence.
Tell students that they will be highlighting phrases, instead of entire sentences because they will be transferring the highlighted information onto note cards.
Tell students that when highlighting phrases, they leave out the little words like "the" and "a" to keep the thought as short as possible, but that the phase they underline should make sense to them.

Finally, have students go back and highlight the four pieces of information that answer the question.

Assessment

Give the students a different one-page article with a research question written across the top. As a homework assignment, have students highlight those pieces of information they think answer the research question. Remind students that they are to highlight phrases, not entire sentences.

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This page was last updated February 21, 2002
This lesson was created to support the AT&T/UCLA Initiatives for 21st Century Literacies.
Highlighting Articles was created by Sharon Sutton.