“We recommend having students do a couple of research + writing assignments before you administer the Explore PT. “

“The quickest way to get a sense of your students’ previous experience is to ask the language arts and social studies teachers in your school.”

Main Steps for Writing a Report or Explore PT Responses

• Brainstorm some topics you’re interested in (in this case, recent computing innovations).
• Choose a topic.
• Conduct a little preliminary research: Do a web search and skim a couple of articles to get an idea what people are saying about the topic.
• Develop a thesis — what is the main idea the report will convey?
• Make an outline.
  • For the Explore PT (or practice PT), the outline is provided by the writing prompts.
  • For a one-pager or longer report, use the standard format: Introduction, sections for each major aspect of the topic you want to cover, conclusion, bibliography.
• Conduct online research:
  • Use specialized databases and general-interest sources.
  • Choose a few sources that provide different perspectives or cover different aspects of the topic.
  • Document your sources so you can cite them later.
  • Make sure your notes are clearly labeled as to which source they came from, whether it’s a quote or a paraphrase, or whether the note is your own response or question.
  • Make sure the types of resources you use (including whether they’re online or offline) follow the requirements of the assignment.
• Organize your notes according to which Explore PT prompt or section of the paper they’re most relevant to.
• Compare your outline with your notes.
  • If there are major gaps in your notes for a particular section, or big unanswered questions, consider finding additional sources to fill in the gaps.
  • Alternatively, you may need to revise your outline to reflect the main themes you found in your research.
• Create a checklist of the main points you want to make in each section, or (for the PT) in response to each prompt.
• Write a first draft of the report or written PT responses, and compile the bibliography. (You may find you need to collect additional information.)
• Let it settle.
• Reread and edit for content, grammar, and style. Make sure you included all the important points in your outline.

“You may need to specifically talk about using Wikipedia as a source — in fact, this can be an opportunity to discuss the trade-offs in crowdsourcing and user-generated content!”

Questions to Ask Yourself About a Possible Source

• Does the publisher curate and take responsibility for the content?
  • Do the authors have a relationship with the publisher?
  • Is the content supplied by site users, and if so, is it moderated?
  • Is this site just scraping content from other sites?
• Can you see the bios of the writers? What are their qualifications?
  • Credible qualifications may include subject-matter expertise, e.g., in computer science, or being a professional journalist — preferably both.
• How long has the website been around? How long has the publisher been around?
  • A long history does not guarantee the source is reputable, but a short history guarantees you can’t tell.
• What is the primary purpose of the website? To inform, or to generate ad revenue?
  • Of course, reputable publishers do sell ad space! But they generally try to avoid really obtrusive ads, and try to make it clear visually what’s an ad and what’s the site content.
  • Names can be deceiving; many sites with “news” or even “encyclopedia” in the title are actually pretty sketchy.

Questions to Ask About a Source, Continued

• Is the website primarily a publisher (a single entity responsible for content creation) or a distribution platform (where different entities can publish their content)?
  • Many sites are both, but it’s important to distinguish which “side” an article or video is coming from.
• Are some of the articles “sponsored content”, or is all the content actually supplied by the publisher?
  • Even many reputable publishers will include sponsored content and native advertising — pseudo-articles written by companies to tout their products or push their brand name. It’s not always well-marked, so you should keep an eye out!
• When was the article written? How important is it for this topic that the article be up-to-date?
  • High-quality websites usually indicate the date an article was written or last modified.
  • For the Explore PT, you are required to cite at least two sources produced after the end of the last academic year.

“While you should encourage attention to low-level requirements (grammar, punctuation, etc.), it is more important to focus on the content of good writing.”

Writing Tips

Think about your target audience (besides your teacher).

• What do they already know about the topic?
• What might they want to know?
• What hooks can you use to connect what you’re saying to their experiences, or things they already know?
• Which technical concepts and terms are they likely to be familiar with already, and which ones do you need to explain?

Writing Tips, Continued

All information should be accurate. If you’re not sure you’re remembering it right, double-check!

Provide concrete examples. For example, if you want to assert that “Social media impacts our privacy because people can figure out where we are,” it will help your reader understand what you mean if you add, “For example, if you have location services turned on for Twitter, it will add your exact GPS coordinates to every tweet.”

Be concise and relevant: avoid repetition, statements of the obvious, and irrelevant tangents. Every sentence should contribute to supporting your main point in some way.

Exceptions: The introduction and conclusion of a report may summarize information provided elsewhere. For a long report, it may also be useful to begin your introduction with one sentence that is common knowledge, like “Search engines play an important role in how people access information online.” This explains why you think the topic is worth writing about, and provides an anchor for the new information you’re about to give. But stop there!

Be clear. Avoid rhetorical flourishes, complicated sentence structures, and ten-dollar words. When you review your first draft, try to read like you’ve never seen this before. Is anything ambiguous or confusing? Would you know what you meant, if you hadn’t been the one who wrote it?

“Consistent citation helps you meet the scientific writing goal of clarity: you don’t want your reader to be confused about who said what.”

How Not to Plagiarize

The permissible types of content in scientific writing are:

• Quotation with citation: Word-for-word copying should have quotation marks around it, and note who the source was directly after the quotation.
• Paraphrase with citation: If you’re explaining what another author said in your own words, give credit to the source immediately before or after. (If a whole paragraph is about one author’s ideas, you can cite the source once at the end, as long as you think it will be clear to the reader that it applies to the whole paragraph. Otherwise, provide a citation for every sentence that explains someone else’s findings or ideas.)
• Original work: Explaining your own scientific results, findings, or ideas. Make it clear when you are transitioning between describing others’ work/ideas and describing your own!
• Common knowledge: If a fact is common knowledge (for example, that smartphones combine features of telephones and computers), you don’t need to cite a source.

What counts as plagiarism? It’s tricky, but warning signs include:

• More than two words in a row that are identical to the source. (Except proper nouns/names, which count as one word for this purpose.) Bad example: “Social media impacts our privacy” → “Online networking impacts our privacy”
• Minimally different wordings but the same sentence structure as the original (swapping in synonyms). Bad example: “Twitter will add your exact GPS coordinates to every tweet” → “Twitter appends your precise geolocation to each post”
• Minimal rearrangements of the same words into a different structure. Bad example: “how people access information online” → “how information is accessed online by people”

In other words, both words and structure need to be different!

Special Cases for Citation

Images and other digital content: For the Explore PT, you must provide citations for all digital content included in your computational artifacts, regardless of their copyright or license status. This is a good rule any time you use images, digital content, or code created by anyone else.

But wait, what about public domain? For a public domain image (including the CC0 license), the creator does not require you to attribute/cite the image. However, you may still be required to provide an attribution by the standards of the genre you’re creating in — such as scientific writing — in order to make it clear that you were not the creator of that part. If you don’t specify, the default is to assume you created everything that’s included in your work! So if you don’t provide an attribution, you could accidentally mislead your readers.

Numerical data: Cite sources for numerical data when you refer to it in writing or use it to make a chart. If you performed calculations or transformations, be sure to make it clear what came from the source and what you did. For example: “In Moscow, I have calculated that the ratio of real to fake fur hats is approximately 3:2 (based on raw survey data from Bulgakov 2015).”

“You may need to provide an attribution for a public domain image in order to make it clear you were not the creator.”