Find Homework (K-12) Resources

Research is a systematic and creative approach to learning and understanding a topic. We collect, organize, and analyze evidence so that we can better understand something we are learning about.

Research might include reading articles and books, watching documentaries, or it might include performing surveys and collecting data. It can also be cyclical - you can go back to any stage at any time during your research.

1. The Research Topic

We have to decide what we are going to research. Some assignments will have a list of topics to choose from and others will let you choose something. Ask yourself:

• What do I already know?
• What do I want to know?

Once we know what we want to know, we can formulate our question. This is what we are trying to answer with our research and will be our topic.

2. Identify Keywords

When we are efficient researchers, we won't be typing wildly into a search engine to find an answer. We are going to select the most important words in our question and use those to do our search.

Instead of "What are the impacts of climate change on Florida's waterways?" We are going to use "climate change" and "Florida waterways." We might even want to remove Florida or get even more specific, like looking at the St. John's River.

3. Preliminary Search and Evaluating Our Topic

Before we get ourselves set on our topic, we want to do a quick check to see if there are even enough materials on this subject to write a paper about. We're going to look through the catalog for books and check a couple databases to see what we can find.

We may need to

• Try different keywords
• Reword our question
• Pick a new topic

Remember, research is cyclical so we can move back up to any step and try again.

4. Find and Evaluate Sources

We can start finding and saving our sources once we know we like our topic and our question. We will need to

• search for materials
• evaluate those sources
• save our materials and write our citations

Some assignments may require you to write an annotated bibliography.

5. Take Notes

As you are reading, take notes about what you are learning in your research. Keep track of which source provides which facts. This will help streamline your writing process. These notes and facts are the backbone of answering your question.

You can put these notes into an outline to organize your thoughts and make sure you are making the strongest and most logical arguments.

6. Write Your Paper

Start putting it all together into your long form research paper. Use the outline you made when taking notes to make sure you hit all of your key points. Remember you can go back to other steps as you're writing. If you find you need another source, go look for one. If you think you need to rearrange your notes or your outline, go for it.

7. Proofread

No, seriously. Read it back to yourself and check for errors. Have someone else read it. Make sure it makes sense. Don't just rely on tools like Grammarly and spellcheck to make sure everything is right.

The flowchart below shows how these parts of the process lead to each other or might send you back to something you've already done. You will also find some handouts and printables to help you work through the research process.