TOPIC: The best way for society to prepare its young people is for parents, teachers, employers, and government leaders is to instill in them a sense of cooperation, not competition.
Part A. Literature Review:
(Refer to previous weeks lecture in week 11 on how to come up with good brainstorming questions)
Make a list of several possible questions that emerge from your brainstorming and remember: Write them in the form of a question, as a sentence that can sensibly end with a question mark. We are not looking for “topics,” except as very general categories in which you might pose questions (like “electronic writing” or “language I’m not allowed to use.”) A topic is not a question and will not suffice for this project. If you can’t say it in the form of a question, it’s not a question.
When you find a question that’s interesting to you, the work of making a good research question has just begun. You also need to find out whether it’s a question that’s interesting to anyone else and that other experts in the field would agree is an open question — one that has not yet been answered. To know this, you need to do some preliminary reading in the existing conversation on your question.
· In your draft research question, find keywords that will let you search for related articles in a search engine like Google Scholar or databases like Academic Search Complete or any databases like Google scholar or the ones our college offers. You should also brainstorm a list of keywords that isn’t necessarily in your research question itself, but relates to your area of inquiry.
Keywords that will find the research you’re looking for can be hard to guess, and it’s not uncommon to initially not find the results you’re looking for from the keywords you can think of on your own. Plan to ask a teacher, librarians, or friends to help you think of additional keywords. (Librarians have training and wide experience in choosing keywords that give good results — definitely plan on talking with one during your research, as early as possible.)
· In your search engine or database’s list of hits, read results quickly, just to get the lay of the land: Do any of the sources you find already answer your question? Is there considerable debate around your question? Or can you not find people addressing your question at all?
If your sense from preliminary research is that there are already plenty of good answers to your question, select another question from your previous brainstorming. Perhaps more likely, your initial source search will show you how to modify your first version of your question to make it narrower, more specific, and more answerable. Usually, first versions of research questions are too broad, and reading some of the existing literature on the subject helps you see how. One reason to do preliminary research before “locking in” your question is exactly to get a sense of your question’s fit to the field and feasibility. You can expect to need to modify it some as you begin to compare it to existing research.
What you will submit:
· You need five initial sources total, with two from peer-reviewed research or scholarly articles. For each source you find participating in the conversation you’re seeking, write a short paragraph (just a hundred words or so) summarizing the contribution that source makes to the larger conversation about your topic. (Often the source itself will include an abstract that details this very point.)
· Reading over your summary paragraphs for each piece, create an overall account of the conversation you’re finding so far by writing a brief (two- or three-paragraph) summary of the results of your preliminary source search that explains what the research you’re finding talks about and how it relates to your question and argument you intend to make. You are basically answering the question, “so what-why is this source relevant to important to the topic I am trying to make?”
· An APA Reference page with all five sources correctly formatted in APA.
