7 Essential Research Hacks to Teach High School Students

As an AP Research teacher and librarian, I find myself thinking about research a lot. Research skills are something with which all students should leave high school. The research process can be daunting, so I have developed “research hacks.” These strategies can give kids confidence and an actionable plan as they begin their exploration.

1. Begin with Key Words

Students want a big topic or research question right off the bat, but I always ask them whether that’s putting the cart before the horse. Start small. I encourage students to list all the key words associated with their inchoate idea, even if vague.

If a student is studying the impact of social media on student health, they may choose key words and key phrases like social media, mental health, depression, anxiety, cyberbullying, or the names of specific social media platforms.

Maybe students are looking at AI's impact on education. Some key words and phrases may be artificial intelligence, AI tutors, educational technology, the ethics of AI in education, or the future of learning.

I challenge students to think big. “Don’t worry if the ideas seem messy or too general. Just get it on paper! Worry about refining the topic later. For now, reflect on all the phrases and key words that give the topic context.” I also ask that students think outside their comfort zone. In many cases, student researchers are wedded to an early topic and never want to explore outside their initial idea. Encourage students to think up key words for a variety of topics. They may find an avenue of research they never considered.

2. Start Broad, Then Go Narrow

Eventually, the student researcher will need to narrow their ideas. Ask them to take that broad idea and the associated key words and begin to focus on the specifics.

Start by having them develop a research question from the key words. After the research question is created, then they can start refining it.

One method I use is to have students write the research question out, underline all the nouns, and then attempt to think of synonyms that are more precise.

A student might ask, “How does social media affect teenagers?”

I ask them to underline the nouns social media and teenagers. For this hypothetical, I might ask students to identify a particular social media platform, like Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.

Use a Socratic line of questioning to help students investigate terms like teenager. How might we refine that word, making it more precise? What kind of teenager? What is the age or gender of the teenagers in question? What about teenage lives, more specifically, might be affected by social media: study habits, sleep patterns, interpersonal relations, attention spans, etc.?

I imagine we’d come up with something like this: “How does TikTok’s algorithm affect students’ sleep patterns?”

3. Use Google and Wikipedia

Wikipedia and Google are your friends, despite what you may have heard.

I’ve written about how to use Wikipedia wisely. Students should search a variety of Wikipedia pages on their subject matter—following and critically reviewing the links, bibliography, and external sources. Remind students that they shouldn’t cite Wikipedia itself. Rather, they can use it as a springboard for preliminary research by analyzing and mining the sources that each page offers.

Google searches can provide excellent early-stage information as well, allowing students to find a lot of information easily. Remind researchers that Googled information is a first step to learning about the key words and topics. It shouldn’t be considered a high-level resource for finding credible sources.

There are many open-source websites of a higher caliber. My colleague developed a list of open-source websites that students can consider exploring.

4. Search Smart

Students will need to expand their research beyond Google and Wikipedia. Use Google Scholar and library databases more strategically. Teach students to use quotation marks, “cited by,” and related articles to find information. Many young researchers don’t understand the science behind good searches, which allows users to refine, broaden, or narrow searches according to their needs.

The library at the University of California, Santa Cruz, offers a helpful website that demonstrates ways to use Google Scholar efficiently, particularly the “Advanced Search” commands ("OR," "published:" and date ranges). Many students are unfamiliar with these commands. Similarly, the University of Washington and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology give great advice for improving searches on library databases.

In addition to key operators (like “AND”), students can use filters or fields to further structure searches with precision and intentionality.

Deliberate, carefully crafted searches go a long way toward making research more effective.

5. Follow the Footnotes

Being a researcher is a lot like being a detective, but the clues are the footnotes, citations, and bibliographies. The sources that other authors mention in their work can be incredibly helpful for student researchers.

One of the simplest but most important hacks for student researchers is to scrutinize documented sources.

6. Read Smart

If using books, I encourage students to skim the index, table of contents, and introduction to grasp whether the text will be helpful. Students don’t need to read everything right away—they can read critical texts in full later. A refresher on the anatomy of nonfiction texts might help researchers learn how textbooks are constructed.

Emphasize to students that when reading journal articles, they can look at the abstracts, introductions, and conclusions to identify whether the material is relevant or beneficial to them.

7. Research Logs and Annotation

In many cases, students revisit sources again and again, uncertain if they have identified a source as pertinent.

Come up with some organizational tool or graphic organizer so that students can keep track of their research. There are different ways of doing this. They can keep a running bibliography with a brief synopsis of the source and the date on which it was analyzed. Another idea is to maintain a diary with informal thoughts and opinions about each source.

Furthermore, I always encourage annotation. Have students print out their sources and use pens or highlighters to identify important information. They could also download the PDF version of sources into a note-taking app and highlight key words or phrases. Encourage them to think of a system or color code to mark important data or quotes.