Title: Synthesis Strategies for Research Papers
Audience: Bucknell University students
Date: Fall 2022
Software Utilized for the Project: Articulate Storyline, Audacity, and Adobe XD for mock-ups
About the Project: While students consistently say that selecting a topic is the hardest part of a research project, research and feedback from some professors indicates that they also struggle with synthesizing information from multiple sources. I find this to be the hardest part of the research process and it is at the highest level of Bloom’s Taxonomy. A neuroscience professor I worked closely with observed her upper-level students tended to write literature reviews that were arranged by source, like annotated bibliographies, rather than grouping information based on topic.
Students clearly need more help with understanding what synthesis is and some strategies on how to do it, but they are not at the point of need for these skills when professors invite me to their classes, which tends to be at the beginning of the research process. An online tutorial can be used at the point of need, either voluntarily by students or it can be assigned by a professor.
This project ended up taking two different paths simultaneously. I used this project for my Introduction to Instructional Design course, but ended up building it faster at work than the course assignments allowed for.
My instructional design documentation shows a deliberate process, but the final interactive tutorial I built for my library has fewer assessment questions. The reason for this is that within the Instructional Design course, we were designing stand-alone learning objects and all learning objectives needed to be assessed within the tutorial. In contrast, while I offer this tutorial on the library website, I am also marketing it to faculty who then have the option of assigning mind maps and note cards to students as part of the mini assignments built into the research process within their coursework. The existing tutorial is interactive and asks students to demonstrate an understanding of the material presented, but not all learning objectives are assessed within the tutorial, and that is appropriate for the real-world context of the tutorial.