Research Experience
- How has your process for doing academic research changed since the beginning of the semester?
- I would say my process for doing academic research over the semester has changed significantly. I am a Communication Studies major and for our papers we usually don’t have to have peer reviewed articles and we can just use websites or news articles as our sources. This was one of the first classes where I have actually had to use peer reviewed sources, so that took a little more time to read and get used to using. But, other than that, I am still used to using AP style, the formatting, and sections used in the paper.
- Describe your process for evaluating and selecting sources for your research assignments. How did you decide which sources to use and which not to use? Did you add or change sources for your final assignment after turning in your annotated bibliography?
- I chose majority of my sources based off of reading their abstract. If I thought the abstract was going to be useful then I went into the conclusions and their data just too see how much information they had and the findings from their research. At the end of the assignment I kept the same sources throughout, with an addition of one or two.
- What challenges did you encounter when doing research for your assignments in this class? What strategies did you use to overcome them?
- I think the biggest challenge for me was majority of my sources only got their data from a small population, which was part of most of their limitation. So to overcome that I looked at it as they were all one study just from separate areas of the world, and combined the data wherever it was necessary.
- Have your attitudes and perceptions (confidence level) about doing research changed over the course of the semester?
- I have always never really been confident when conducting research, especially research I know nothing about before hand. If it was a topic I was more invested in or had more knowledge I think it would have increased. But towards the end of was somewhat confident with the project, but I think I could have gotten more involved with it.
- Think about the research you’ve done this semester, and describe what you think it means to “Think Like a Researcher?”
- I think what is means to “Think Like a Researcher” is to not expect any specific outcomes. I know I have gone into previous studies in the past and assumed my hypothesis was going to be correct just from the knowledge I already had on the topic. Anything is possible when you are conducting your own study. Previous literature may have come up with different answers and your own data from your study may come up with different answers. You need to learn how to expand your thoughts and think differently from what you would think yourself.
