Points of View Reference Center
Points of View Reference Center is a comprehensive database designed to provide students with resources that present various perspectives on controversial issues. It offers a wide range of content, including thousands of essays, articles, and images across over 400 topics such as climate change, civil rights, and the Black Lives Matter movement. The platform aims to help students develop persuasive arguments, enhance their analytical thinking skills, and gain a deeper understanding of the complexities surrounding these issues.
Each topic includes an overview, a main argument, and a counterargument, accompanied by a Guide to Critical Analysis to aid students in evaluating the controversies. Additionally, the database features materials from diverse political viewpoints, including magazines, newspapers, and primary source documents. With supportive tools such as Lexile measures for reading difficulty and engaging multimedia elements, Points of View Reference Center is tailored to accommodate various learning styles and enhance curriculum standards. This resource is particularly beneficial for educators looking to enrich their teaching with critical analysis and persuasive writing strategies.
Points of View Reference Center
Points of View Reference Center provides resources that present multiple sides of an issue, and also includes rich content that can help students assess and develop persuasive arguments and essays, better understand controversial issues, and develop analytical thinking skills. Designed specifically for students, this database helps users develop persuasive arguments and essays, better understand controversial issues, and develop analytical thinking skills.
The database’s content includes thousands of essays and images spread across hundreds of different topics, covering pressing current issues including climate change, civil rights, COVID-19, the Black Lives Matter movement, and many others, and helps students gain fuller perspectives on these topics in order to generate informed opinions of their own. Additional content, including magazines from across the political spectrum, allows students to dig even deeper into current issues and consider a variety of perspectives.
Resources for Critical Analysis
Points of View Reference Center covers over 400 topics, each with an overview (objective background / description), point (argument), and counterpoint (opposing argument). Each topic features a Guide to Critical Analysis, which helps the reader evaluate the controversy and enhances students’ ability to read critically, develop their own perspective on the issues, and write or debate an effective argument on the topic.
Points of View Reference Center provides a balance of materials from all viewpoints with main essays, leading political magazines from all sides of the political spectrum, newspapers, radio and television news transcripts, primary source documents and reference books. The database also offers related images and supplementary research guides for writing position papers, developing arguments and debating.
School Curriculum Support
The content in Points of View Reference Center supports curriculum standards that ask students to analyze informational texts and hone their critical thinking skills. Each search result includes Lexile measures, which provide educators with an estimate of a search result’s reading difficulty and the approximate grade level reading ability required to comprehend the text. Other features, such as colorful, engaging images and text-to-speech for HTML articles, further assist teachers trying to accommodate different reading levels, English speaking abilities, and learning styles.
Teachers hoping to incorporate EBSCO resources into their classrooms can also take advantage of the Curriculum Standards Module, which helps educators correlate EBSCO content quickly and easily to Common Core, state, or other curriculum standards.
About EBSCO
EBSCO is the leading provider of research databases, e-journals, magazine subscriptions, e-books, and discovery service to libraries of all kinds. For more than seventy years, EBSCO has partnered with libraries to improve research with quality content and technology.