Unit 6 WK 11 Research Process Best Practices Guide

Research Process Best Practices Study Guide

Directions:

This is a collaborative assignment completed in your RESEARCH GROUPS cohort for Week 11.

You and your group members will work together to develop a Best Practices guide for researching a general topic after you've each shared your individual processes with one another, and after you've each reviewed content material in A Writer's Reference.

Your Best Practices Guide should contain, at minimum, the following:

• Title of guide with all group member names
• A 100-word summary of what researching means to you and your group--what exactly are you doing when you're "researching" ?
• A sequential (in order) list of at least 5 steps in conducting research. Think of this as a story--where do you begin, what happens on the journey, what stops should you make along the way, and where should you end? Each segment of the journey should have about 50-150 words in which the step is labeled or named, described, with hoped-for outcomes shared.
• Example: Step 3 Refine search terms:  After looking for a little while using the original search term or question you were given by your teacher or that you developed yourself, you might have a better idea of some different ways you can search for that idea or ask that question, since as you're searching the internet and library databases, you get to see different terms. Make a list of these other possible terms to use and begin searching with those. The hoped-for outcome here is that as you refine your keywords and keyphrases, you'll get more and more targeted articles for your topic.
• A concluding statement about research process and best practices (the most important takeaways) in about 100 words.