If you look at the module on Using web resources, you will see that there is a section on staying current. This is often a springboard for your learners to become interested in a current topic, such as the Olympics or the International Aids Conference or the Soccer World Cup because they can hear about it on the radio and some may be lucky enough to follow the event on the television.  After identifying an event such as these that interest your learners then you can start to motivate them to phrase questions for research. 

We need to challenge learners with thought-provoking questions rather than presenting them with tasks such as, "Do a project on Gauteng." Instead, give learners a real problem, such as where would they like to live in South Africa? You could give an example of statistics of the number of murders committed in each town. Then you could ask learners to answer questions such as the following:

• Which city had the worst murder rate in 2000?
• Which city has the fastest rate of decline in its murder rate today?
• Which regions of the country are most dangerous

As we have discovered in previous pages, asking questions is quite an art.   If we ask the right type of questions we are going to make our learners think and if we don't then they are just going to repeat what we have told them.  Higher order questions require time for learners to think about the answers.  To build on Bloom's taxonomy again, higher level thinking

1. Knowledge: define, label, list, memorize, name, order, recognize, reproduce, state.
2. Comprehension: describe, discuss, explain, express, identify, indicate, locate,
3. Application: apply, demonstrate, dramatize, illustrate, practice, schedule, use,
4. Analysis: calculate, categorize, compare, contrast, distinguish, experiment, test.
5. Synthesis: arrange, collect, construct, create, design, plan, prepare, propose, set up,
6. Evaluation: appraise, assess, defend, estimate, judge, predict, rate, support, value,

It is clear that the teacher has an important duty to make sure that the questions that they ask are stimulating and thought provoking. Just compare these instructions for projects:

In questions such as these in the right hand column, the educator's role  is to encourage learners to work with information rather than simply find the right answer to the question.

A Grade 3 class at a primary school in a large suburb of Tempe in central Arizona, wanted to do a study on the flowers and animals in the desert. Instead of asking the children to do a project on "The plants and animals found in the desert", the teachers asked them to investigate : How do plants and animals interact and depend on one another for food and shelter? To read about how they planned the project have a look at the teacher's reflections at

http://www.wested.org/tales/07desert09.html

If you would like to see how the simple Grade 3 project on the desert turned out, have a look at

http://seamonkey.ed.asu.edu/~storslee/botan.html

Have a look at a South African example, included on your CD Healing the nation.