Welcome students! This guide provides helpful links and resources to help you with your research. Please use the tabs to navigate through the pages of this guide.
- Review Your Assignment
- What is the purpose? (cause and effect, persuasive, educational, analysis, opinion, compare & contrast)
- Are there any requirements? (type and/or number of resources, citation style)
- When is the paper due? (start early, to be sure you have resources in time)
- Save your work (you can e-mail articles to your self)
- Identify/Develop your topic
- Use can use databases such as Opposing Viewpoints, newspaper, books, internet or even Wikipedia to come up with a topic that interests you.
- Use an online Reference Resources such as, Credo Referenc to gather background information on your topic.
- Focus in understanding your topic and the issues surrounding it.
- As you are reading about your topic:
- Use concept mapping (see video) or other brainstorming strategies to organize your ideas.
- List questions that you would like answered to help you focus your topic and guide your research.
- Evaluate your questions
- Selecting Sources:
- Use the keywords that you jotted down while reading and begin searching for new information (journal articles, books, website, media etc..)
- Make sure the sources you are selecting:
- Add new information to your existing body of evidence
- Lead to other sources of information that might provide more details or better evidence
- Provide a new perspective or claim for your research
- Cite your sources
- ​Save/print the sources that you will be using for your paper for citation purposes.
