Designing Research Assignments

Students often struggle with starting their assignments and managing their topics. Many do not know how to focus on a research question rather than a broad topic and they need help in developing arguments.  Beyond that students need support in how to integrate and cite their sources in their projects. This often leads to unintentional plagiarism.

The library offers two asynchronous badging workshops that address these problems. These Canvas Information and Data Literacy workshops on exploring topics and avoiding plagiarism can be assigned by their professors and when they work through the content and assessments, they can send the badge indicating completion to their teachers.

Creating Manageable Topics & Research Questions This workshop will help students identify workable topics for literature reviews and other projects that will require them to write with sources. Upon successful completion of this workshop, they will be able to:

• Identify the components of the research process
• Identify and access sources that could help you gain a working knowledge or background information about your topic
• Identify characteristics that make a topic either too broad or too narrow
• Formulate a research question
• Outline a search plan by using concept maps that document search terms related to your research question
• Students can enroll here