The Dead and the Gone by Susan Beth Pfeffer Research Project

Facilitate the process of investigating relevant topics, documenting information gathered, and delivering formal speeches with this low-prep, standards-based research project to complement Susan Beth Pfeffer’s dystopian novel The Dead and the Gone, the sequel to Life As We Knew It. The focus of the project is natural and human-influenced disasters, covering twenty topics including the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the flu pandemic of 1918, the tri-state tornado outbreak of 1925, the Fukushima nuclear accident (2011), and Hurricane Maria (2017). A detailed scoring rubric is provided. Materials are delivered in Word Document and PDF formats. Ultimately, students will perform the following tasks:

• Articulate connections between a research topic and the assigned novel
• Conduct research using available resources
• Collect and classify reliable sources
• Develop successful methods of recording information
• Evaluate the credibility of source work, taking into consideration readability, date, relevance, expertise, and bias
• Apply conventions of MLA formatting
• Correctly site resources to avoid plagiarism
• Organize information in a cohesive manner, using a note-taking system that includes summary, paraphrasing, and quoted material
• Analyze, synthesize, and integrate information, generating a thoughtfully comprehensive report, free of generalities and redundancies
• Present findings verbally, using their own words