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Community Scavenger Hunt Teaches Research Skills, Much More

"I am most impressed by the quality of the work the students do," says Bill Street. "This scavenger hunt really motivates students to hone their research, citation, and public speaking skills. Many of the middle schoolers could easily compete at the high school level!"

A librarian at Ashland (Oregon) High School, Street directs the State of Jefferson Scavenger Hunt, an annual competition in which teams of students from local middle schools have three days to research an extensive list of questions of many types -- academic, current news, art identification, audio music tape identification, and more -- using local and school library resources, the Internet, and other sources.

Click for a sampling of questions from the State of Jefferson Scavenger Hunt Click.

The team from Pinehurst School took first place in the 2007 State of Jefferson Scavenger Hunt.

Street generates the list of questions and creates the annual hunt. As the students reach their answers, they must document their findings. The hunt culminates in an adjudication session at Southern Oregon University, and a winning team is selected. In fact, Southern Oregon University Pre-College Youth Programs oversees and coordinates the State of Jefferson Middle School Scavenger Hunt, and it is funded by the Southern Oregon Educational Service District.

AVID HUNTERS

Steve Boyarsky, superintendent of the district, is the founding father of the hunt in Southern Oregon. He patterned the middle school event after the Friends of Millard Fillmore Trivia Hunt high school scavenger hunt that began 25 years ago in the San Francisco Bay area.

"After running the State of Jefferson Scavenger Hunt at the high school level for 12 years, we decided middle school students might have fun with their own hunt," Boyarsky told Education World. "We scaled the questions back a bit and found that the middle school students were very capable of finding challenging answers, documenting their sources, and defending their answers. We were very surprised by the middle school students' sophistication and work ethic."

Goals of the Hunt To increase knowledge of how to access information To learn teamwork and organization in an academic arena To construct a persuasive argument with supporting evidence To critically analyze sources of information To learn the importance of precision To have fun with academics

Many teachers and coaches have told Boyarsky that the hunt is the most difficult educational activity that their students take on all year. It often teaches them more about locating answers, documenting evidence, and supporting an argument than any other activity.

When the scavenger hunt began, students camped out in college and high school libraries doing research using microfilm, but the Internet has changed the hunt in dramatic ways, says Boyarsky. Getting documentation from a years-old newspaper was previously more of a challenge. Access to technology allows today's hunt to include art, music, map questions, and more. Some of the most enduring tales from former hunts center around "bring-ins," real items that the students must procure and present.

"One year students had to bring in a set of military dog-tags from Vietnam," Boyarsky remembers. "Students told stories with tears in their eyes about how a vet had handed his deceased comrade's dog tags from around his neck, stating that he would loan them, but he hadn't taken them off for 30 years."

LASTING ARGUMENTS

Burning Questions Competing teams of middle school students face questions like the one below in the State of Jefferson Scavenger Hunt and respond with the correct answer, the source in which they found it, and page numbers, etc. Question: To whom is the following quote attributed: “Caesar had his Brutus - Charles the First, his Cromwell - and George the Third, [‘Treason’, cried the Speaker] ... may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it.” Answer: Patrick Henry Click for ten more questions from the State of Jefferson Scavenger Hunt Click.

Emotional stories and impassioned arguments illustrate the serious nature with which the students approach the scavenger hunt. Boyarsky notes that a difficult series of arguments ensued at one adjudication when the students were asked to identify the tallest building in the world. Based on the date of the documentation they found, individual teams were able to support differing answers.

"One of the middle schoolers was adamant that his team had the only correct answer, even though the rules state that you can differ from the director, given two corroborating sources," said Boyarsky. "He argued, 'But they are wrong to say it is the Singapore Towers! They would have been right two years ago, but as of today they are wrong and should not be given credit for the answer. The only correct answer is ours!'"

When he was a high school coach in the early days of the State of Jefferson Scavenger Hunt, Bill Street's winning team was invited to compete in the Friends of Millard Fillmore Trivia Hunt.

"After three days of racing around the San Francisco Bay area and researching our hearts out at Stanford University and the San Francisco public library, among other exotic locales, we celebrated our achievements by touring the Saturday night lights of Chinatown," recalled Street. "My students told me it was the greatest time of their lives."

Article by Cara Bafile
Education World®
Copyright © 2008 Education World

Originally published 01/07/2008
Last updated 12/08/2008