Although this guide was designed to support "Pennsylvania Online: A Curriculum Guide for School Library Media Centers" (1985), the State of Pennsylvania curriculum guide for online searching, many of its components are also suitable for use by school librarians when teaching the elements involved in searching for resources manually. Designed to assist students in formulating focused research questions, the guide provides lesson plans and worksheets for each of seven steps in the process of defining a research problem: (1) "Developing the Research Question" encourages students to do preliminary reading to identify current issues within a subject field; (2) "Identifying Key Words" helps students develop the skill of identifying key nouns for a database search; (3) "Expanding Key Words" addresses synonyms, variant forms, and related terms; (4) "Recognizing General and Specific Topics" helps students to narrow a topic; (5) "Choosing Appropriate Terms" enables students to recognize and eliminate terms that are not related or compatible with the research question; (6) "Recognizing the Relationship Between Key Words" instructs students in the most effective ways to select operators; and (7) "Developing a Search Strategy" focuses on the selection of an appropriate subject category, selection of an appropriate database and analysis of its content, and deciding whether the search should be performed online or manually. Answer keys for the worksheets and a glossary of basic search terms are included. (SD)