More important, students struggled with the concept of citing someone else’s idea.
HOW TO PROPERLY CITE SOURCES IN TEXT FREE
(Also check out MyBib, a free option that’s a GoogleApps choice.) Additionally, students could choose to use a resource like EasyBib (which, can I say, I really wish had been around when I was writing my thesis!) to help. I made a flipped classroom video to help them review at home as well as a “cheat sheet” to walk them through it. The first time I implemented both in-text and end-of-text citations, students struggled with formatting. I tried to make our citation method a bit simpler version of MLA, because what I really, really wanted them to figure out was that they needed to cite, not necessarily just memorize the specifics of citation styles. If it isn’t common knowledge, if they read it somewhere, if it’s a quote, they MUST cite. My new goal became teaching the students that they must cite. You won’t be surprised that we struggled for awhile Historians always credit the work and thinking of other historians. Whatever the style preference may be, the rationale never changes. And I still have to look up the exact formatting on the OWL Purdue site EVERY TIME. I’ve written citations in many styles: MLA, APA, Turabian, you name it. This key understanding is more important for them to grasp than any particular citation format.
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First and foremost, I wanted them to understand that the most important thing about citations is this: If it isn’t your idea, you need to cite it. I resolved that for our next essay I would explicitly teach them about citations. Before they went to the Internet, we all knew where the information came from, but now more accountability needed to happen. With no accountability for where they were getting their ideas, students WERE backing up their thesis, but not crediting where they found the information. So for this new essay assignment I was getting weak paraphrasing, with or without citations.
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I overlooked (and shouldn’t have) the difficulty students often have transferring their understanding and experience from one class to another. They were doing it in English class, so I felt they’d be able to carry the skill over to history. I had always assumed that students understood what I meant when I told them to cite their sources (you know what happens when you assume…). There was enough material from class to draw on.
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I had previously required students, if they DID use the Internet at all, to cite their sources, but no one really ever resorted to online investigation. It seems that that unit didn’t have enough approachable text, because when it came time for the students to write their papers, instead of the usual details used to back up ideas – and these details looking more or less familiar across the board – I was getting mostly ideas born of Internet research. One year I introduced a new essay at the end of a unit that hadn’t previously had an essay assessment. “Wait…Do you know which ideas are yours?” Sure, when they did a research project, I would make them turn in a list of “source websites,” but it was still nothing formal. Whenever they insisted on using quotations in their writing, I would require them to cite the source of the quote using the same method they used in English class.īut I was still a long way from requiring both in-text and end-of-text citations. Meanwhile, in English class, the students were being taught MLA format for quotations. Students were using the discrete materials from class to formulate a historical argument, back up their ideas, and then write four or five paragraph essays. This approach to historical writing worked quite well for a few years.
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Creating citations on top of that was too much, I thought. I was already asking them to do so many things – create an argument, find details to back it up, and write in a structured essay format. So long as we used the source in the current unit of study and students didn’t go elsewhere for information, I didn’t worry about citations. If the students used, say, the Constitution summary I provided the class, or a excerpt from Howard Zinn or Paul Johnson, or something found in their textbook, that was okay. I wanted them to be able to internalize the basic structure of an argumentative essay, make an argument, and back it up. When I first started teaching writing in history class a number of years ago, I was totally focused on the students just getting their ideas out and being able to write on historical themes.