Keeping Research Skills Relevant in the Age of AI

This year I knew I needed to approach research differently with my eighth-grade social studies students. In the past, I’ve assigned a standard two-page paper on a historical reformer that weaves together primary and secondary sources, sometimes with a creative element.

This didn’t feel as relevant in an age of AI. So I asked myself what really matters when teaching middle school students to do research: I value students’ taking time (in this case, three class periods) to find quality sources that offer astonishing stories. History’s fascination lives in its aha moments, many of which arise only with substantial digging and false starts.

Also, as much as I love to teach writing, this assignment is a deconstructed research paper in the form of an annotated bibliography, not a polished final product. Ensuring that students write in their own voices is hard enough right now given AI, without needing to incorporate outside sources as well.

finding compelling sources

In eighth-grade U.S. history and civics, we often discuss strategies for finding valid internet sources. Few are better than lateral reading from Stanford’s Digital Inquiry Group, which has students immediately click away from one webpage in order to vet the content on Google, Wikipedia, or other sources. However, I have often found myself stymied by the gap between teaching quick factual verification— which asks for just basic reading comprehension—and encouraging students to think like historians, which requires assessing the level of detail and complexity that different sources offer.

In this annotated bibliography assignment, students picked a U.S. reformer such as Alice Paul, Frederick Douglass, Dolores Huerta, or William F. Buckley. Some students ask to research someone not traditionally considered an activist, such as pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi. As long as the students can explain why this person made a positive and lasting change in U.S. society, I’m in.

I then asked students to find the following: 

1. A quality internet source. Students first had to list three valid sources they found, and then they were asked to choose just one—ensuring that students didn’t just pick the first site they saw. 

1. Two articles on ProQuest Central. I asked students to use ProQuest Central to find a source from after their reformer died, or from late in life if the person is still alive, helping students understand their reformer’s legacy. 

1. Two articles on ProQuest Historical Newspapers. These are from before their reformer died, showing students how the media viewed their reformer at the time.

Students wrote notes on these sources and later rated the sources from one to 10 on their effectiveness. I wanted them to evaluate the quality of in-depth information and fascinating stories these sources yielded that couldn’t easily be found anywhere else.

One gap I realized in reading the bibliographies was that the stories sparkled but weren’t always comprehensible in the broader scope of the reformer’s life and time. Next year, I would emphasize including quotations long enough to feature historical context, and then referring to that context in students’ commentary on the quotes.

What Students Discovered 

I thought everyone would find the best information in the third option, ProQuest Historical’s eyewitness newspapers. And a number of students did rate these articles highly because they were immersive and helped us imagine the reformer’s time period. For instance, with journalist Nellie Bly, newspapers covered nearly every detail of her adult life, including when she admitted herself to an asylum and how she traveled the world. 

Students with reformers less known during their lives had a harder time pinpointing relevant eyewitness accounts, showing that some people’s influence appears only later. Civil rights activist Fred Korematsu, for instance, appeared rarely in newspapers of the 1940s except in connection with the Supreme Court case Korematsu v. U.S. (1944). However, he was frequently mentioned in newspapers from the 1980s in relation to federal government reparations for Japanese Americans.

The more modern ProQuest articles, from after the person’s death, also produced compelling stories—but in a more legacy-driven way, focusing on long-term impact. Obituaries, which I call mini-biographies, put accomplishments into perspective in a way that day-by-day historical articles could not. For instance, the 1968 death notices about Helen Keller immediately homed in on the scene of Anne Sullivan tapping the word “water” into Helen’s hand, a seminal turning point in any account of Keller’s life.

Finally, for a number of students, the internet also proved a strong source with careful searching, especially for iconic reformers such as Lolita Lebrón, Malcolm X, and Harvey Milk. Students often discovered overlapping information in secondary sources that highlighted key events with articles, speeches, letters, and even timelines. Lateral searching—as well as going beyond the Google AI summary and the first few search results or pages—helped students find reputable sites such as Densho, the Library of Congress, and the National Women’s History Museum.

Beyond Media Literacy to Moral Courage

After students finished their research, they created small Canva posters with a classmate. Aided by Gemini suggestions, I paired reformers who shared similar activism, such as women’s rights defenders Alice Paul and Sandra Day O’Connor and performers Josephine Baker and Toshiko Akiyoshi. On these “Advice Through the Ages” posters, students wrote similarities, differences, a human story, and a piece of wisdom that their reformers would offer us today. These visuals brought the past closer and showed that reformers’ methods might be similar even if their causes diverged. 

My eighth graders have talked a lot this year about the concept of moral courage or beauty: the most common reason people around the world feel awe. I saw this courage in their annotated bibliographies, with tales about physician Paul Farmer approaching each community he visited with open arms or Arab American activist Alex Odeh trying to counter stereotypes through speaking out. 

By the time students finished their research, they not only had learned about media literacy but were inspired by the nuggets of history they unearthed. Ultimately, returning to basic research skills with this annotated bibliography demonstrated the power of history to influence these middle school students’ lives today.