ProQuest or Protest?

8.RL.1 Cite the textual evidence that most
strongly supports an analysis of what the text
says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from
the text.
In other words:
I can trace and evaluate the argument and claims in a text.
I can assess whether an author’s reasoning is sound and whether he has enough evidence to support the claims he makes.
In the 7th & 8th grades students are given assignments which require reading and analyzing certain types of writing. They also work on essays requiring information from various sources. It has been my experience that given no guidance students will default to “google” in their research. They will immediately, after logging in to the computer, go to google with their query, “what are the red worms in our compost bin?” “who is the president of Argentina?” , or simply a term “bug”, “virus”, “alternative energy” (actual research questions and terms entered into google by students). The term “bug” which a student used to find information about a virus, listed everything from Volkswagen to entomology. The article count for “alternative energy” in google is 192,000,000. Factor in side bar advertisements, images, videos and various other distractions on a page, students can spend a lot of time tangled up in the web. I admit that google is the go to place for information in a hurry but for academic research, the library databases should be the “go to”.
Proquest in my opinion provides a lot of information, journals and magazines however for our purposes in 7th & 8th grades, students will tire of the scholarly appearance and return to the comfort of google with images, videos and quick facts.
In order to use this database, teachers will need to be proactive, finding specific journal articles, guiding students along the way. The article count in Proquest for “alternative energy” is 297,591, substantially less than google but still overwhelming for young minds. To meet the common core standards, from this database for middle school students, I would preselect certain articles pertaining to the topic at hand, perhaps guiding students to find the articles on Proquest. After reading the articles, students would show they have met the standards by answering questions or writing an essay supporting their writing with examples from the article. Another use of this database would be to use it as a tool to demonstrate research techniques. Students would be given a topic and asked to find websites or articles regarding this topic from various databases. This would allow students opportunity to experiment with databases and compare the search results, analyzing sites and articles for accuracy. Even though students are not likely to use ProQuest at the middle school level, they need to know of its availability as they continue their education.