Research Skills: Credibility and Relevance

Imagine constructing a lesson plan on the causes of the American Civil War. If you base your instruction on a brilliant, peer-reviewed essay about twentieth-century agricultural economics, your foundation is intellectually sturdy but entirely useless for the task at hand. Conversely, if you base your lesson on an anonymous social media post written yesterday, the topic might match your syllabus, but the foundation is made of sand. In educational research—and on the Praxis Core Writing exam—every piece of information you gather must pass two uncompromising filters: is it true, and does it matter for the specific question you are asking? A teacher is fundamentally a curator of knowledge. To curate effectively, you must understand the architecture of research, from the mechanical strategies of querying a library database to the critical analysis of an author’s hidden intent.