As discussed in the Week 12 lecture, your team needs to quickly choose a topic and begin working together to do the research and writing of your analytical research report. As I discuss in the lecture, this is a secondary research report, meaning it is based on research that you find done by others. You are not required to perform primary research or building/testing your topic on your own. This is the foundation for the rest of your collaborative project, which also includes a presentation, a website, and report on collaboration. I will discuss these latter parts next week.
With your analytical research report problem/topic identified, you can begin researching it with the library’s databases and books, periodicals like the New York Times, and the World Wide Web.
Evaluate and vet your sources so that you can account for their veracity, accuracy, credibility, etc.
To get started with writing your report together, check out this week’s Weekly Writing Assignment and the lecture. You will need the following outline:
Introduction (topic and why your report is important) Objectives of the research (what were you attempting to do?) Method (methodology–what kinds of research did you do, how did you do it, and why is the research sound?) Results (what did you find in your research? facts, quotes, figures, interviews, surveys, etc.) Discussion (how do you interpret your results? what story does your data tell us? results and discussion can be combined, but title this section appropriately if you do so) Conclusions (what conclusions do you draw from your results and discussion? what is the significance of what you discovered?) Recommendations (what do you think should be done to solve the research problem based on your research? this section is what all of your work is leading up to.)
Also, here are some resources and examples that I discussed in this week’s lecture to help you with writing and designing your analytical research report.
- Doodle (for finding meeting times for your team)
- Explanations of report parts (look under Primary Research Report, but remember you are writing a secondary research report)
- Example Student Research Report on Solar Panel Manufacturing and Waste
- Example Student Research Report on 5G
- Sample Research Report (note the layout and design)
