Over the course of the semester, my process for doing academic research has changed. I have learned how to navigate more efficiently through academic research sites and use them to find credible sources. For example, I learned more about using parenthesis to close off what you want to research. If you research parent involvement and “parent involvement” in a research engine they are going to search for different things. Parent involvement will find articles that have either parent or involvement in them, while if you search “parent involvement” the search engine will search for articles that include specifically parent involvement.
In finding scholarly articles to use, the first thing I filter is the date of the article. More recent articles have up to date information and studies in them. The next thing I learned to do was quickly scroll through the article and see if the subtitles match the kind of information that I am looking for. The final thing I do is see if there is anything about the author such as a college they graduated from or other articles they might have written.
One major challenge I faced when researching articles, specifically in the article synthesis process, was keeping my articles organized. Having an overwhelming amount of tabs open on your computer can be intimidating at first, but I overcame this by sorting the tabs out in alphabetical order by titles. This way when doing the research I can easily go back to the article and find the information I need.
Overall this semester, my confidence in doing scholarly research has grown tremendously. For example, In another class I am taking I had to do another research project as well. We also went to the library for that class and I was one step ahead of everyone else in the research process. I was able to more clearly “think like a researcher” as well. This means I was able to more clearly state the research problem and think of possible categories to research to help with the question.