My Research Questions/Concerns

 Overall, I am very excited to delve more deeply into an aspect of Home Fire.

In high school, I took AP Research where we worked with the UW Library, and I think this helped give me a little bit of experience in sorting through university library resources. While that process was most definitely helpful, there were a few difficult elements that I am slightly nervous about in starting this new research.

The first thing I remember struggling with was finding articles with the exact right information. The research papers we were reading were long and detailed. This was great, but it was always frustrating when there was a paper with a really promising title that ended up not having any information super relevant to what you were looking for. I think in this research, I will need to make sure I am throughly reading and going over the abstract of each article before diving in further. 

Another thing I remember being a roadblock was organizing all my sources. At this point, I had not really figured out quite how I liked to annotate things, so I had my articles in a variety of places. Some were printed out, some were on my computer, some I just took notes over in my journal, etc. It became difficult to find where a certain statistic or piece of evidence came from, since I had no real method of organizing these. I think this time I will standardize my method of annotation, and keep everything together, so that they will all be on hand when I need them. 

Comments

  1. Monique Cov.September 30, 2022 at 2:52 PM

    Hey Cassi! That is interesting, I personally have never really done this type of scholarly research so I am a bit nervous. I do have similar concerns of doing so much research only to find relatively little of what we wanted. I can't wait to start the process and hope that in the end it really isn't as much trouble as I thought it was going to be. Thank you for the advice on the roadblocks that you have previously come across. :)

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  2. Jalen PaigeSeptember 30, 2022 at 5:47 PM

    I agree, Cassi! My biggest fear has to be running into some long article, book, etc. and finding out only after I have read it all that nothing inside of it was valuable to me! I am hoping we learn more about how to avoid that on Tuesday. I am curious to know what you may have learned in AP Research. I didn't take that class, so I am a bit daunted by this whole project. I will definitely try to standardize my sources/annotations like you suggested, thanks for that!

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  3. Hilary LeSeptember 30, 2022 at 11:31 PM

    Hi Cassi,

    I haven't done research like this before, so it's really interesting hear about your previous experience with research. I hope that we learn how to find good, useful sources on Tuesday to help us with our research. I think I will also try to find a good way to organize my notes and sources to make everything easier in the long run! Thank you for your insight!

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  4. HeatherLOctober 1, 2022 at 2:49 PM

    Hey Cassi! I thought the points you rose were really interesting. Having never taken AP Research, I feel like I don't know a lot about how to best curate good sources. Like you, I'm also worried about going through long publications only to find out that they don't have the information I'm looking for. With luck, Tuesday's class will have some tips and we can try to figure it out together!

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  5. Paulos HabtewoldOctober 1, 2022 at 8:35 PM

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  6. Paulos HabtewoldOctober 1, 2022 at 8:39 PM

    Going through a potential source and finding out that it isn't useful to you really does hurt. The last time I did a research paper in an English class, I remember that I had to switch the topic I wanted five times because I simply could not find any scholarly resources that supported my claim because I wanted to try finding a fun claim (I wanted to do one about Anti Heroism or Hope through comic book characters). What I learned though is to spend more time picking your topic and to make sure that you know that you pick the safe option instead of going with a riskier option.

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    1. Critical Thinkers and WritersOctober 4, 2022 at 9:16 AM

      Hi Paolos--one important thing to know about doing research at the university level is that you don't necessarily need to find sources to support your specific claim. Original research is exciting because it's new and often no one has published on that idea yet. That should encourage you, not stop you, from pursuing it. This is what graduate students, for example, look for. If this happens to you this term, talk to me before you change your topic!

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  7. Catalina DegnanOctober 1, 2022 at 11:09 PM

    Hi Cassi, Wow, I didn't even know there was a thing as AP Research until right now. I think that it's awesome that your school was able to expose you to university level research. You're probably going to be the most experienced out of the rest of us! In response to your ideas on organizing your research, maybe keeping a journal solely for this research as well as keeping tabs on which notes come from which source will help! Good luck:)

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  8. Audrey SchroederOctober 2, 2022 at 11:06 AM

    Hi Cassie! Firstly, I'll say it's so cool you've already had the chance to navigate a university's library database. Hopefully that will prove to be useful knowledge once you start this research process. If you have any suggestions or tips you've learned, I'm all ears! Secondly, I hadn't even really begun to consider how I might organize my research. After reading this, I'm realizing that's probably something I should start thinking about!

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  9. John SawyerOctober 2, 2022 at 1:03 PM

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  10. John SawyerOctober 2, 2022 at 1:03 PM

    Hi Cassie, I have not done any scholarly research in the past and it sounds like a good learning experience. Finding an article with a promising title that leads to nothing is certainly one of my biggest fears jumping into this research project. Was your experience only with checking out books from the school library (pdf/hardcopy) or if you looked at articles too?

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    1. CassiOctober 2, 2022 at 1:51 PM

      Hey John! In my class we did a lot of articles/research studies too! It was a year long course where we went super in depth on a certain topic, so we all ended up reading about 30 research studies! Definitely a lot of work, but super cool to see all the resources a university library had!

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  11. Griffin JonesOctober 2, 2022 at 3:20 PM

    I think it's really great that you shared that roadblock you had doing research with us. Researching is pretty new to me and any bit of advice from someone who's done it before is super valuable. Organization definitely seems important with all of the different sources and pieces of information that need to come together, so I will be sure to keep this in mind when I start researching!

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  12. Noah English 11H BlogOctober 2, 2022 at 5:16 PM

    I second the concern of long detailed articles, I try to be efficient in my work—so reading long sources that in the end offer little help to my topic wastes time. I also agree with the importance of organization, I need to get in the practice of a single standardized system for keeping my work together.

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