You may not realize it, but you do research all of the time. When you want to know the lyrics to a song, the last time Mount Vesuvius erupted, or what a zero-gravity environment feels like, you look it up, or you ask someone who might know. Although just about any question you have can be answered by searching online, questions with complex answers (such as What is a culture like?) require a little more effort.
Several lessons in this module, starting with this one, will ask you to complete a research project about a culture that is different from your own. You’ll perform research similar to what Jackie used to learn about Japan. However, the purpose of your research is to help you create a report to share with your teacher and classmates.
Before you jump in and start doing Internet searches, though, it’s best to have a plan. Study the slides below to learn how you can conduct your own research project.
All research begins with a topic. Sometimes your teacher will assign broad topics, and you can choose something related. At other times, you will need to come up with a topic on your own. Either way, the topic you choose should be complex enough to write several pages about, but not so difficult that you’d have to write a book to explain what you learn about it.
Once you have a topic, the next step is to create questions that identify what you want to know. These questions should help you stay focused on three or four aspects of the topic, and they should guide your search for answers. Remember this important point: Good research questions are not easy to answer. Instead, they require you to search for information that you didn’t know.
Once you have a set of questions, it’s time to look for answers. As you search for information, make sure that the sources you use are trustworthy. One way to do this is to compare the facts in one source to the facts in another. If a fact shows up in many sources, it’s more likely to be true.
Another part of the research step is keeping track of the information you find in order to avoid plagiarism, or taking someone else’s work and claiming it as your own. Taking notes during a research project goes beyond summarizing what you’ve learned, though. You should also include source information, such as the title of each article or video and the name of the website where you found it.
If you are asked to complete a research project for school, chances are very high that you will also need to report what you learned. It doesn’t matter whether your final project is an essay or a presentation―you’ll still need to write about your topic using your own words. And of course, the writing process also involves revising and editing your work to make it audience-ready.
The last step is to share what you’ve learned with others. Your final project may be a report, a presentation, or both. In school, this kind of report is often the part of the project that receives a grade. However, sometimes your teacher will base your grade on the process you used as well.
Question
What would happen if you skipped steps in the research process or got them out of order?
