Resources Tutorial: Overview on Using Resources

Tutorial: Overview

Resources Tutorial:
Overview on Using Resources in the Cultural Inquiry Process

Although your cultural inquiry is situated in your classroom, school, or other local educational site, your work can benefit in a variety of ways from the work of others. Particularly as you work through steps 3 through 6 in the Cultural Inquiry Process, you may need to locate appropriate resources, read these with your puzzlement in mind, and integrate these resources to support your decisions.

Locating Resources

1) You can begin to locate resources using a variety of strategies including:

Using resources that you already know about
Finding resources recommended by classmates, colleagues, or instructors
Following links from the CIP Resources section
Using a university library database or search tool
Using an on-line search engine such as Google, Yahoo, etc.

2) Keep in mind what might be relevant for your topic in your search. For example, if your students are from El Salvador, you may want to look more broadly at resources for "Central Americans" or "Latinos."

3) Identify key words and search terms that you can use for library database and on-line searches. Also, remember to explore different paths such as looking up other works by an author who has written something on your topic.

4) Use the guidelines on this website for evaluating resources to ensure that any web-based sources you have found are legitimate.

Reading the Resources

Often external resources that you find can serve multiple purposes in your cultural inquiry. Because of this, you may want to read and re-read your resources for different uses throughout the process. Research studies with similarities to your topic can be especially useful as you can look at how the author drew on theory and research for the study, planned and carried out research methods, and developed conclusions and implications.

As you read your resources, think about what step you are working on and what your purpose is for reading. Here are some examples of possible purposes for reading at each step:

Step 3:

to develop ideas for possible cultural influences
to look at general discussions of relevant theory and research
to examine studies of similar students or groups

Step 4:

to look at similar studies on the CIP website or in published resources to gain ideas for data collection and analysis techniques
to develop ideas about research methods using books on general educational research or teacher action research

Step 5:

to generate ideas for interventions by looking at similar CIP or published studies
to identify useful teaching strategies from teaching methods books and materials
to look at what strategies have been used in the past by other educators

Step 6:

to identify relevant theories and research that could be linked to your study
to develop support for your conclusions and implications

Integrating Resources

You may find multiple ways to integrate and use external resources to support your study throughout the cultural inquiry process including:

to justify your decisions or approaches
to provide evidence or information for a topic or issue
to support your methods and strategies
to connect your study to the broader conversation in the literature

All of these will add to the strength and validity of your research. If you are ready to examine a sample study or work on your own study, you should return to the main menu of the tutorial using this link:

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Cultural Inquiry Process: Resources

Tutorial: Overview

Resources Tutorial: Overview on Using Resources in the Cultural Inquiry Process

Resources Tutorial:
Overview on Using Resources in the Cultural Inquiry Process