As college students we come across in being assigned to do research papers. This may become for some students a heavy task to accomplish. Working in the process of doing a research paper can be difficult to accomplished because of the lack of practice on how to research, choose the right topic, and overall writing the paper. Being part of this experience ourselves we have come up with the idea of creating a research tool where students can use to organize the process of completing a research paper. There are a variety of academic research tools students are able to use to research sources for their paper. This research tool we want to propose it is a different kind of tool because it is an overall organizer that would help the student go step by step to complete the research paper.
JILstep is a mobile application that could be uploaded in any smart phone device. We understand that technology is advancing and many of the students use their phones daily. If we want a research tool organizer to help students to better organize and keep track of their assigned research paper, this is a way that could be available for them to use.
Describing this research tool JILstep app we have put our own experiences input, the process and how we try to organize our research paper assignment. This application would take the students into steps: choosing the topic, familiarize with the topic, find the thesis statement, brainstorming, outline, writing the draft without any source, find sources, and final draft. Student could include the due dates of assignments before starting which helps to keep track of the assignment deadline, enable notification settings in the phone. One of the steps in this app, writing the draft without any source, is an idea that helps to better practice the avoidance of plagiarism in writing. An important task to keep in mind.
In this class we had to acknowledge how to write a research paper. To do so we were assigned to read William Badke book Research Strategies: Finding your way through the information fog. This source was one of our inspirations on creating this tool, in order to help others instead of reading the book the application will do what we learned from it. Badke talks about how to get started on a research paper, from his understanding the best way to start a research paper is acquiring knowledge on the topic. Badke believes to start a research paper you will need at least one minute knowledge on the topic, that is to say you could talk about your topic for one minute without getting repetitive and getting clueless. This is what we want our application to encourage; in the beginning of the research paper the application would make you propose your topic before you can continue. In our belief this helps the student gather a train of thought on the topic and can create a question that can then be analyze further on with information from sources. This also reflects on what we have done in class for our research paper, at the beginning before we started looking for sources we had to propose our topic and this helped us greatly in understanding the topic and what exactly it is we wanted to discuss.
In the web we found an interesting site written by Aaron Couch, he goes over the hassle of starting an assigned research process. He aims the audience by including his experience of also writing research papers for academic courses. Explaining what could be an easier way to conquer our research papers, which is to better organize ourselves. Creating a plan, day to day goals and time framing all our steps. This add up to our idea of creating a research tool: organizer. “The river reader” written by Joseph F. Trimmer is a book containing different strategies of writing different kinds of essays. Furthermore, this great book discusses how to brainstorm, how to use a direct and semi quotation and also how to paraphrase, and more important this book teaches how to evaluate sources credibility. The source that inspired us to build our own documentation is called “Rules of Thumb: A Guide for Writers” written by Jay Silverman, Elaine Hughes and Diana Roberts Wienbroer. According to the authors, there are seven fundamental steps to accomplish a wonderful research paper. The research tool we created would be a great help for students to accomplish their research papers, by better practicing how to organize their process.
