An Annotated Bibliography is a good way to get your students to fully understand their sources, if they are credible, and how each source answers their research question.
Students should first learn to cite their sources in the format of your choosing (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.), using a source citation generator.
Have your students create citations using https://www.easybib.com/
Once they have created their citations, have them list the citations on a Word document and below each citation ask them to summarize what the source is about in their own words.
Here are a few sentence stems for students to use.
In this source the author explains….
The author references _______ to describe ….
The purpose of the source is to ….
You may also want to ask students to write a certain number of sentences or words for the summary. In high school, for example, a summary paragraph could be 5 to 7 sentences in length.
Below their summary paragraph ask students to explain why the source is credible, and how it answers their research question (in their own words, no quoting).
Here are a few sentence stems for students to use.
The source is credible because ….
The source is accurate because ….
The source answers the question ____________________ by explaining….
Before moving on to the research paper, now would be a good time to check student paragraphs. Did they write in their own words? Did they paraphrase correctly? Did they plagiarize? Are their sources credible and trustworthy?
If necessary, have students revise their Annotated Bibliographies. Their writing will be very useful for Research WAC Part 3: Research Paper.