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Starting Your Assignment - Learning Outcomes
- Understand that scholarly research is a conversation among scholars and experts.
- Select a balanced research topic.
- Identify key concepts and keywords in your research topic.
- Find and use credible background information.
Module Links:
Starting Your Assignment Activities
- Have students fill out parts of the Topic Development Worksheet over time
- Facilitate a discussion about common ways to find information. Do students use Google? How do they search? Describe how you conduct research and provide an example of discussions by scholars in your profession
- Have students interview a faculty member about the research process in their discipline and give a 3 minutes PechaKucha presentation. How does each process differ by discipline?
- Have students reflect on steps they take to do research in their lives (e.g. buying a car, choosing a college, etc.). Identify the steps involved in research behind a decision and compare to academic research
- Create sample research papers topics and have students do a keyword relay (student use background information to create a list of synonyms or keywords related to the topic). Teams with the most relevant options win
- Walk through the process of topic development using a sample research paper or publication in the discipline
- Compare Wikipedia to an encyclopedia in the Library on the same topic. What are the differences? What information is similar?
- Have students create a sample research topic. Each pair creates a reading list on the topic using citation chasing
