Sunday, January 29, 2006

Research book notes

I like the research book's emphasis that research is not just collecting information, but rather it must include the interpretation of data, and I like the notion that it begins with a question or problem. There's a nice checklist at the end of Chapter 1 (pp. 13-14) for questions to ask when evaluating research in a journal article or elsewhere.

At the end of Chapter 1 is also a set of guidelines for keeping a research journal. This is similar to the summary/comments on articles that you did last week. One difference is that it has you determine "keywords that capture the focus of the article." That's a good idea as it not only helps you understand the essence of the article, but it will also help you later when you conduct searches for articles.

Chapter 2 has a good checklist for defining and setting up your research problem (pp. 23-24) and another good checklist for evaluating your research plan (pp. 33-34). Usually when we use guidelines like these, we end up with a much better idea of what we need to do for our research.

0 comments: