Encyclopedias are the ideal place to begin your research because they provide clear overviews that help you understand the basics before diving deeper. Most digital encyclopedias include accessibility features such as read aloud, font selection, font adjustment, translation, speech-to-text, and embedded dictionaries. Explore the features to find the ones that work best for you.
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What is it?
Britannica Middle is an online encyclopedia designed specifically for middle school students with over 140,000 fact-checked articles. It includes articles (and images, videos and timelines,) about Progressive Era topics and key figures like Theodore Roosevelt, Jane Addams, Jacob Riis, Ida Tarbell, and Upton Sinclair, along with lesser known progressives like Frances Willard and Samuel Gompers.
Why use it?
The articles are written by expert scholars and checked for accuracy, so you can trust the information for your research. Most articles includes helpful features like related topics (pro tip: click the hyerlinks) and multimedia to deepen your understanding.
Keep in mind
While Britannica provides reliable overviews and background information, the articles are relatively brief, you'll want to use additional sources to find more in-depth information.
You can easily navigate from middle school to high school using the remote control located in the upper left of each entry.
What is it?
World Book Student is an online encyclopedia designed for middle school students with tens of thousands of entries. It includes articles about Progressive Era reformers, a Biography Center with thousands of biographies, images, videos, and helpful research tools like a citation builder that allows you to export directly to NoodleTools.
Why use it?
The entries provide foundational information and include multimedia features that bring history to life. If you need more detailed information, you can also search World Book Advanced, which includes longer entries, primary sources, and more in-depth content.
Keep in mind
While World Book Student provides solid background information, the articles are written for a general middle school audience and may not give you all the specific details about your progressive's accomplishments, so plan to use additional sources to fill in the gaps.
What is it?
Encyclopedia.com is a free online reference database with over 300,000 entries from more than 100 credible, published sources including Oxford University Press and Columbia Encyclopedia. Unlike Wikipedia, Encyclopedia.com's content comes from professionally edited encyclopedias and dictionaries that have been reviewed by editors before publication.
Why use it?
Encyclopedia.com is preferable to Wikipedia for academic research because its information comes from verified, published sources that you can cite in your work. Each article identifies its source. This makes it more reliable and appropriate for school research than Wikipedia.
Keep in mind
Encyclopedia.com is written for general adult audiences, not specifically for middle schoolers, so expect more sophisticated vocabulary and complex sentence structures. Like all encyclopedias, it provides helpful background information and overviews, but you should still use it as a starting point and supplement it with more detailed sources.
