Tag Archives: Research Topic

Wrapping up research topic development, and looking ahead to searching and finding

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Today we spent a good bit of time in class developing research questions and using bubbl.us or regular old pen and paper to draw concept maps. Feel free to scan & post your concept map to our blog.

The draft of your research topic proposal is due on Monday, March 23 by the beginning of class. Please email it to me as a MS Word attachment; that way I can grade, it offer comments, and return it to you by email, even if I’m out of town.

On Monday, we’ll talk about — and do some — advanced internet searching. I hope that by the end of class, everyone will have found at least a few potential sources for their annotated bibliographies (due April 1). Please read Badke chapter 6 (all) and chapter 7, pp. 163-172.

~Prof. Leonard

Research … Diagnosis

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I am working on choosing a topic and developing a research question for my paper. Definitely I have encountered many difficulties.

The first and significant one is a psychological approach of how to convince yourself to write a “brilliant” research instead of a “normal” one, according to Badke in his “Research Strategies”.

Since you have adapted your self to be familiar with a such belief, all other difficulties would have been of less importance.

The key to overcome difficulties that might arise later is to refine your topic proposal so as to come with a specific question to be answered.  Yet, It seems that there are many questions lead to sub questions when you are about pinpoint a specific question!

I don’t know …… I feel that everything ‘ll be ok, or I need to feel so … theoretically at least- at this earlier stage of writing a research!

Journal on Topic.

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The first difficulty that I encountered was that I did not know what topic to choose for my research.  I even looked through some of the previous readings that we were assigned for some inspiration.  After I finally got a grasp on what I wanted my topic to be the next problem was coming up with the question.  The main problem was that my question seemed too open ended and Reading chapter 2 & 3 of Badke helped somewhat with that problem. One question I have about the assignment is how recent should our sources be? so that I can know what time frame to search.

Research topic refinement this week, and reading/blogging for Wednesday, March 18

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On Wednesday, March 18 we will continue discussing developing a research topic, including further refining a topic and developing search strategies. Please bring your topic proposal worksheet in progress to class. I will try to bring extra copies to class, but you can download and print a copy if needed. For Wednesday, please read the following: Badke Appendix 1 pp. 250-260 and review Badke chapter 3, pp. 60-66.

Your blog post for Wednesday takes the form of a research journal. Please write a 100-word post in response to this prompt:

You are working on choosing a topic and developing a research question for your paper. What difficulties (if any) have you encountered as you work on your research proposal?
What strategies (if any) have you used successfully during this work?
What questions (if any) do you have about the assignment?

Questions about the research topic proposal or the annotated bibliography assignment? Get in touch.

~Prof. Leonard