Developing a Research Strategy
Table of Contents
What is research?
“a detailed study of a subject, especially in order to discover (new) information or reach a (new) understanding”
Cambridge University Press. (n.d.). Research. In Cambridge Dictionary. Retrieved October 12, 2022, from
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/research
What is a research strategy?
A research strategy is a step-by-step action plan that gives direction to your thought process as a researcher.
Where to Begin?
Question
This is where you wonder and explore. What do you want to learn about a topic? What interests you? Think about what you need to know. Once you find the topic you want to research, you will develop your research question.
Learn
In this stage, you will learn about your topic. You want to deepen your understanding about a topic by finding varied resources and reading about the topic you are researching. Make sure you check your bias before you start learning. Bias is when you have a particular viewpoint about a topic in favor or against it generally without performing adequate research on it. When researching, you want to be open minded and learn as much as you can about a topic in order to portray factual and accurate information about it when producing your research findings. At this point, you want to gather your works cited page together and you will base your writing from your works cited page.
Analyze
This is where you analyze the sources that you found. How will you develop your thesis statement from the sources that you gathered? Does your evidence support your thesis statement? If not, you may need to find more sources. Once you synthesize and analyze your sources, you can develop your thesis statement and express your ideas.
Write
In this step, you will begin to write and express the ideas that you found. First, create an outline of what you plan to write. Then create a draft of your research and have multiple people look it over and check it for flow and grammatical errors. Once you do this, you can start to draft your final version of your research.
Reflect
In this final step, you will evaluate how you will use the information that you learned to share what you learned, continue to research the topic in more depth, or maybe lead yourself into another research topic. Think about how you will incorporate your new learning into what is next.