Information Literacy

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Toolkit

Keyword hot potato exercise

Students often struggle most with finding relevant sources on their topic because they are entering entire sentences into a database or are using terms that don’t match how authors would describe their topic. The purpose of this activity is to give students experience brainstorming keywords for a particular topic. It also helps to demonstrate that the initial terms they come up with to describe their topic may not necessarily be the terms authors will use to write about the topic.