What is Research?
When we do research on a topic we are asking these three questions:
- What do I want to know?
- What did I find out?
- Where did I find it?
The Research Process
The Research Process Defined
1. Define Your Topic:
Research Question: To what extent do our schools serve the goals of a true education?
2. Gather background information:
Preliminary reading and simple searching that is done to help you build enough basic knowledge of a topic so as to be able to answer Who, What, When, Where, Why questions on the topic.
3. Locate Your Sources:
Where are you going to look for information on your research question?
- Which databases will you use?
- What websites with you use?
4. Evaluate Your Sources:
The most crucial part of this is to READ the sources you find! You can only tell if they are helpful, useful, relevant, biased, and "good" is by reading them.
5. Cite Your Sources:
Every time you do research and use information from another source (not your own) you MUST have a works cited and in-text citations to give credit to the source where you found the information.