It always amazes me to hear stories about how junior high students are thrown into classrooms where they are expected to use skills they were never trained to use. The research report is a nice example. Too often I think teachers assume children can do things they are not able to do or worse yet don't care whether they have had training or not. In the latter case they leave to faith that the child will struggle through it at home and get it turned in. That brings me to another point...why are children doing research papers at home in elementary school? There are so many technical aspects of completing a research paper that they'll need all the assistance they can get from a teacher. Keep the research in the school where ALL the children have access to computers, a library, and trained teachers to help. Teachers sometimes think that they're cool beans when they can display research papers all over that children did with someone else's help at home. There's no pride in that. I like to display things children did under my instruction.
With that said, research reports need to be modeled for children. In fifth grade I start by handing the same book to four or five small groups of children. I like to use the Look Once Look Again science series by Creative Teaching Press because they are short, with great illustrations and cool information about creatures in different environments (ponds, parks, forest, desert...). I define the word bibliography for them along with the word source and have them copy those two words in their notebooks. I go on to explain why we document sources of information when doing research. This is to give credit to someone else's work and to validate our own work.
Next, I tell them the topic of our research reports is going to be organisms in the pond (if you choose THE POND from the series listed above) and I have them, in small groups, take turns reading the book and gathering information they feel is important to the report and writing it in their science or writing notebooks. After ten minutes of gathering important facts (time will vary depending on the book used) I go around the room and ask them to give me some examples of pond organisms they discovered information on and to tell me something interesting about each. After I gather all of the information from the children and display it on the overhead I tell them that in the next lesson we are going to read from another source to get additional information and then write our report and bibliography.
I will write about this part in the next article in this series.