by The Open University
Available in 34 free installments
Owner:
?Research? may sound rather a grand word for what you feel you do at this point of preparation for your assignment. Don't worry: essentially all it involves is finding out more about the topic in hand.
Let's use a dictionary as an example. In looking up a word, you are effectively ?researching? it. We tried looking up the word ?research? in a couple of standard dictionaries, not so much to find out what the word means, but to see if a definition might provide a useful slant for this section of the unit. Indeed it did, for three phrases not only confirmed our understanding of the word but also gave us a way forward that might be helpful to you. These three phrases tell us that research is:
a systematic investigation
a critical investigation
a careful search.
'Systematic? and ?careful? suggest a thorough-going search of the material available to you, making sure that you don't leave anything important out. ?Critical? suggests something else: deciding what is relevant to the subject, whether something you have found out should be included or not. If you look again at Figure 1 you will see that there is an arrow linking the researching stage with the question. This is to make sure that your answer will be focused and really address what the question is looking for. (You might also like to look back at Activity 9, which dissects a question). Note, too, the reference to ?search?: it is very unlikely that the question is going to be answered just by looking at a single section of your course.
In short, researching something can clarify or explain, but also may spark off further thoughts which can lead you deeper into your topic.
So what material do you have available to you?
Your materials are likely to be your first sources of information.
Any guidance notes you may have been given will sometimes tell you exactly which sections you need to look at. But don't forget that your course materials encompass more than just these texts.
Make use of any handouts you've been given.
Your own notes of what you have been reading or watching; from tutorials, or from observations or experiments you have been carrying out.
Newspaper articles or reviews, chosen carefully, can be a useful extra up-to-date source for some courses.
Of course, there are many more sources available to you through libraries or the internet. Your course materials may also provide reading lists. If you have time to undertake further research, that's fine and is good academic practice. Certainly you will not lose marks if you restrict yourself to the course materials; it is how you answer the question that gives the grade, not how much you know. You can always follow up some of the suggested extra reading once the course has finished.
At this point you are likely to have a great deal of material and many ideas to hand, most probably in note form. Now is the time to start refining and focusing. You may have been doing this already, as you have carried out your research and thought over your findings.
Let's move on to the more detailed planning.
