Week 1: Research-Based Inquiry

Research and Inquiry

We perform research every day, which we can define as collecting information to study and draw conclusions. Whether we’re comparing prices for a big purchase, finding a new restaurant to try, or looking up the bus route to a friend’s house, each of these processes starts with a question and the need for a specific solution. In academia, this process is a little more developed. First, we’ll start with inquiry. We can define inquiry as an investigation to ask narrow and refined questions to develop knowledge and ideas about an issue. This process invites a complicated range of answers and perspectives, and the goal is to remain neutral and discover conflicts, rather than finding a quick answer and moving on. By starting with a strong, open-ended inquiry question, you can help ensure that your research will be well-rounded and complete.

As you begin your inquiry, you have to first decide what you’ll investigate. Your class may have a theme or specific area of focus, so within those limitations, you can identify a topic, or a broad category of interest. Generally, these are big, neutral categories like “education” or “athletics.” They begin to define what you’re interested in. Within a topic, you can begin to define issues, which may be more controversial or have multiple sides. For example, within education, issues include the cost of college education, or the use of standardized tests in K-12. Each of these spark specific discussions with evidence for and against that make these issues complicated and engaging.

Recency and Relevance

When thinking about issues, the relevance and recency of the issue is also important. For example, standardized tests may have been really important for you to get to college, but they aren’t used as often during college courses. This means that standardized tests may be less relevant to college students; however, if you’re studying education or have children who are taking these tests, then this issue is likely to be more relevant to you!

With recency, you should consider timing. Some issues have been resolved or were more popular a decade ago. Other issues might be so new that we haven’t had time to study them yet. While you don’t have to choose something from the front page of the newspaper, considering the timeline of your issue will help you find a more engaging issue.

Checking In: Questions and Activities

Answering the questions below will help you develop and focus the Introduction of your project, exploring your interests, why this issue is important, and how to transition from your brainstorming, to a topic, and then to your specific issue.

1. Brainstorm some topics and issues you may be interested in researching. It will be helpful to find a balance of an issue that concerns you and that you want to learn more about, but not something you feel strongly about or have argued about before. If you feel as if you already have all the answers, you won’t be able to complete this process and it makes your job of representing all the sides much harder! The issue you choose must also be relevant so that you can find appropriate research to help your investigation. Consider:
   • RELEVANCE: Who does this issue affect? Who cares about this, and in what ways is this issue still affecting people? Does the issue have multiple perspectives? Would people take different positions on this?
   • RECENCY: Has this situation changed recently? Did we recently learn something new? Have people changed their minds?

Week 2: Evaluating Sources

During your research, you’ll need to represent multiple points of view by reviewing and citing a variety of sources. Broadly speaking, sources can be categorized as popular or scholarly.

Popular Sources

We interact with popular sources every day. The articles linked in your social media feeds, the magazines at the grocery store checkout, and the evening news are all considered popular sources. To identify a popular source, these are some common, rhetorical characteristics:

• Author: journalists and editors
• Audience: written for large, general groups of people; not always specified
• Genres: magazine articles (e.g. interviews), newspapers (e.g. editorials), and many books
• Include photos, are shorter in length, more easily understood, often persuasive

Popular sources are great tools to learn about a topic quickly and are published daily. This means you can find information on brand new topics and current events, and there will be a variety of publications on the topic that draw varying or contradictory conclusions. This helps diversify your research and learn more very quickly.

However, because these sources are written so quickly, may be based on opinion, and sold or make profits from clicks and views, they’re not as trustworthy. Writers who produce popular sources are often not specialists or authorities in the field; instead, they report on and make sense of daily events, significant studies from experts, or try to persuade readers to adopt their points of view.

Scholarly Sources

To access scholarly sources — also known as peer-reviewed or refereed sources, or even journals — you’ll likely need to use your university library. These journals typically require subscriptions and special access, which universities typically pay for with your student fees. Once you’ve accessed your university’s subscriptions, you’ll have access to hundreds, if not thousands, of journals on specific topics within your major and everything else. You can likely tell by looking that you’re reviewing a peer-reviewed source from these rhetorical characteristics:

• Author: often multiple authors, hold advanced degrees, lists what university the author works with
• Audience: written for others in this specific field, readers need understanding of the jargon, or specialized vocabulary
• Include long reference lists at the end, often uses tables and graphs to communicate data, longer texts with sections such as: abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion

These texts are much more complicated and sophisticated, so be patient as you read. A good first step — before you try to read the entire text! — is to focus on the first paragraph, which may be titled as the abstract. This paragraph summarizes the entire article, explaining the end result. Unlike popular sources that may try to keep you guessing, the purpose of scholarly sources is to present the findings. If you read the abstract and the article seems like a good fit for your research, download or save it to read more closely. If not, try your search again! Once you have a few or several scholarly texts that seem like a good fit and you’ve evaluated their credibility (explained below), prioritize your reading and start with the text that’s the best fit for your research question. Throughout the sections of scholarly texts, the most relevant information will come from the Discussion and Conclusion sections. While the other sections provide context and specific details on how the research was completed, you’ll focus most closely on the Discussion and Conclusion, where the authors will explain their significant findings and why this new information is so important.

If you’re having trouble finding appropriate sources, this may mean that you need to adjust your topic. You may have too narrow of a search. Or, you may just need to revise your search terms. Unlike Google, where you can type in a complete question and find answers, scholarly search engines are very particular about your searches. Consider your key words again, consult your instructor and librarian for assistance, and make adjustments as needed.

Evaluating Sources

Once you have some sources, it will help to verify their credibility. This will save you time and help make sure you’re using the most trustworthy and relevant information in your research. When deciding to use a source, there are some specific characteristics that we can review and evaluate to prove whether or not the source is ultimately trustworthy:

• Author: What experience (time working in the field, lived experience, etc.) or expertise (degrees, awards, other publications, etc.) does the author have?
• Evidence: Where does information in the text come from? Are other sources cited?
• Bias: Is the author objective? Do they have something to gain or lose in the issue? Do they represent and explain both their point of view and others’?
• Timeliness: Is the article recent and relevant? Are the sources recent and relevant?

If your source passes  all or most of these checks, you likely have a credible source! It’s okay to have some questions and to challenge the information, but if your source fails more than one of these tests, you’ll likely want a different, more credible and reliable source. This skepticism will improve your research and get you thinking critically about where the information comes from, who’s behind it all, and why they’re writing.

This assignment requires one popular source and one scholarly source, so keep this in mind as you evaluate and critique your sources. Make sure that they work together well, focusing on the same issue, and are credible and reliable.

Checking In: Questions and Activities

• Once you have your sources, you’ll be able to complete the Research section of this project. These each have multiple pieces, including the MLA citation, summary (thesis and key points), and evaluation. Review the summary units to make sure you can write a strong key point summary to represent your research clearly and fairly in the Research section.

Week 3: Analyzing and Applying Research

Your research is coming together! This week, you’ll continue to closely and critically read your sources as you complete your draft. This week focuses on the Discussion. Similar to your scholarly sources, this is the chance for you to make sense of what your research is saying. It’s time to answer the research question.

Analyzing Research

So far, you’ve drafted the Introduction to your research, and completed the Research section to report on what your sources say and why they’re trustworthy. Now, you can analyze these ideas to answer your research question. An important part of research is to make connections between your sources, so consider how your sources agree and disagree with each other. If there are still questions about the issue, what information is missing? Asking all of these questions will help you draw conclusions from the two sources you have, as well as continue planning your research. Just like your scholarly articles that outline the next steps of the research process, you want to think ahead about what comes next so you can strengthen your ideas and anticipate the arguments on this issue.

This is your chance to make sense of your sources and show why they’ll be important for your group to use. Your Research section began to summarize and evaluate sources, and now you can illustrate why these resources matter. You’ve done all the background work you can do, and it’s time to take the last step of the Conversation Model and make a contribution, based on the information you’ve found.

Throughout this project, you’ve listened in the Introduction by checking in with yourself and explaining how you arrived at your issue. Your Research forced you to ask questions and learn more about the issue, exploring multiple angles and forms of evidence. Now, as you draft the Discussion, you get to make a contribution by showing the connections and creating something new out of the evidence you’ve accumulated. By completing this portion and outlining the answer to your inquiry question, you’ve completed the research cycle.

Checking In: Questions and Activities

1. The assignment sheet offers several prompts for this section of the assignment. Take some time to brainstorm and take some notes to answer these questions. Brainstorming through each of these questions can show which areas you know a lot about already, and which sections you may need to spend more time with. If you get stuck, you also still have time to talk with your instructor or share ideas with your peers before you complete your final draft!