Remember – You have a journal entry due weeks 1-7 in this course. Consider the prompts to be a way for you to write down your thoughts as you apply the week’s content to your own personal, hypothetical, research project. These entries are important as you work to craft and fine tune the research question that will be the focus of your signature assignment.
Journal entries should be 2-3 paragraphs long (or refer to the journal entry OR our Journal Rubric for guidelines) but can be longer if you prefer. Again, this is a place for you to reflect on what you are learning. The prompts are there to help guide the process for developing your research project and to understand research methods. The feedback you receive from your instructor will be critical – be sure to read his/her comments!
You will have a journal entry due weeks 1-7 in this course. Consider the prompts to be a way for you to write down your thoughts as you apply the week’s content to your own personal, hypothetical, research project. These entries are important as you work to craft and fine tune the research question that will be the focus of your signature assignment.
Journal entries should be 2-3 paragraphs long (or refer to the journal entry for guidelines) but can be longer if you prefer. Again, this is a place for you to reflect on what you are learning. The prompts are there to help guide the process for developing your research project and to understand research methods. The feedback you receive from your instructor will be critical – be sure to read his/her comments!
Each week please respond in your private journal to the corresponding journal prompt.
Week 1:
In this course you will be creating a hypothetical research proposal; it is hypothetical in that you are not actually going to collect any first person research. However, you need to approach this work as if it were 100% real. The more you ground it in reality, the stronger the learning experience. This is an opportunity for you to learn HOW to put a research study together, HOW to identify the different components of a research study, and HOW to implement the components in your own proposal. Recognize that there is a difference between discovery of research (what already exists) and conducting research (gathering data to learn something new). Again, for clarity, discovery is when you acquire expert knowledge from existing literature and conducting research is actually collecting and analyzing first person data. Understanding this, address the following:
What TWO different topics are you interested in learning more about?
Thinking about your topics, what kind of study would you be interested in conducting to gain first person knowledge of your topic? Recognizing that this is only week 1 and you don’t yet understand the nuts and bolts of different research methods, what kind of real world research would you like to explore and collect? Think about an area of interest and a collection method that might empower you to be directly engaged in the research study process; being directly engaged with collecting and analyzing research AND adding to the shared body of knowledge on the topic. Important to consider, your topic must be researchable AND measurable.
