Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer Research Project

Promote student choice and facilitate the process of researching scientific and societally significant topics from beginning to end with this low-prep, standards-based resource pertaining to the novel Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer. Students will choose from more than a dozen topics—Yellowstone’s supervolcano, Hurricane Katrina, the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, and nuclear disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima to name a few—and navigate academically appropriate sources with the goal of teaching their peers about their topics. 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