At the Kent State University Geauga Campus, several instructors place specific items on reserve for student research and provide students with a list of required web sites to examine. Although this procedure may appear restrictive, students learn how to use specific reference materials and compare ways in which their classmates incorporated the same sources into their assignment. By using the identical reference materials, students share the same knowledge which enables them to identify errors in misquoting and paraphrasing. Comparing the use of identical material can be used prior to a more extensive research assignment as a preliminary exercise to teach students how to recognize errors in quoting references. Another activity that helps students develop their paraphrasing skills is to require them to write summaries without the text in front of them.
Instructors can give the students short excerpts of Internet passages to read and summarize.
If it appears that a summary matches the content of the article too closely, then students can be instructed on how to quote a paraphrased passage. For additional practice, students can locate and summarize web sites on their own, but more importantly, they can be asked to critically assess whether these pages are legitimate references. This practice will develop the students' evaluative skills and begin to engage them in the process of systematic thinking that is a skill necessary for the review of research materials. To illustrate this model, English instructors at the Kent State University Geauga Campus provide a list of the novels, short stories, and other materials on which their students will have to write papers. The library staff then bookmarks all related web sites and gives copies of the links to the instructors.