Education: The Research Process

1) Choosing a topic is the first step of the research process. Picking a topic that interests you will help your research process go faster and be more successful.  Choose a topic that is interesting to you or highlights a gap in research, and on which you can find quality resources.

Get background information on your topic. As you begin your research process, ask yourself: What question do you hope to answer with your research? Use textbooks, web resources, encyclopedias etc. to help you identity vocabulary, key issues, and themes of your topic.

2) Create a Search Strategy and Develop a Research Question: Use basic questions- who, what, where, when, why and how to break your topic into a searchable question. You might need to narrow or broaden your research question depending upon if you are finding too much information or too little.

 After you have your research question,  come up with "key" words that you will use to search for information on your topic. Keywords are the main ideas or key concepts from your research question. Use boolean operators like (AND, OR, NOT) to connect your keywords. Quotations will keep your search terms together. 

Examples of Keywords: 

• learning outcomes
• assessments
• curriculum 
• higher education
• early childhood education                                                                                                                                                                              

Example of an education research question: What causes burnout in elementary school teachers?  Keywords: burnout and elementary school teachers. Then think of synonyms for those keywords-  Burnout (stress, job-related stress)  Elementary school teachers (primary school teachers, K-5 teachers)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

4) Finding Library Resources-  Start your search using the search everything box https://library.madonna.edu/   and  then search these subject specific databases and multidisciplinary  databases using your keywords.  Databases are similar to search engines but primarily search scholarly journals, magazines and more. Useful Education databases are below.

• ERIC
• Education Source

5) Evaluate Resources :  Use lateral reading  and the SIFT method to evaluate your resources. 

6) Organize, Write, and Cite: Visit the writing center to receive help for writing your paper. 

Use this Assignment calculator to see the steps of the research process and stay on track, so you don't turn in a late assignment!