Guiding Questions Shape Your Research

Now that you've learned about the research process, we'll begin to look at developing your research question. Research is personal and will make more sense to you if it's meaningful. As you begin your quest, in this section you'll develop guiding questions. Guiding questions help to lead you your research question. Reflect for a moment, using these guiding questions to brainstorm topics that might interest you. During the activity section of this lesson, you'll choose a topic for your research.

Guiding Questions:

What am I passionate about?
What am I interested in?
Are there any topics I wish I knew more about?

These questions help you to determine your information need, which you learned about earlier. You'll have a chance to create guiding questions to help you develop your larger research question.

Activity: The Right Questions

To prepare you for thinking about asking questions, please view this TedX video. This is a longer video (20 minutes) and if you feel that you understand the concept of asking the right questions after ten minutes or so, please free to continue with the course.

In this video, the speaker, Rachel discusses asking the right questions. On her search for information, she discusses, 'What makes a good question'? Her personal examples highlight her experience in learning to ask the types of questions that would help learn practical information.

Asking the Right Questions

It's time for your thoughts. Please write and reflect upon a time that you noticed that you or your students were asking 'the right questions'. What does this mean to you? In your opinion, is there a wrong type of question? If you could describe the type of questions you would like your students to ask, what characteristics would they have?

Activity: Creating Your Question

In this activity, you'll be viewing a Prezi presentation while developing your research question. Throughout this presentation you will ask, think, and reflect as you shape and plan your journey.

Directions: To view this presentation, after clicking the link below, select the right and left arrows to proceed to the next slide. It is recommended that you right click on the link and select the option to open it in a new tab or window so that you can navigate back to this course easily.

Creating Your Research Question

Now that you've formulated your question, you're ready to move onto the next unit of the course!

Back to Home

Forward to Unit Two: Using Advanced Search Techniques