Final Research Guide

Introduce your topic and state your research question. You’ve been working on this throughout the course and may need to slightly tweak earlier iterations of it based on instruction feedback. Identify your audience. Is this for a general audience? Or experts in the field? Or people with some established knowledge on the topic already? This part should be a single paragraph.

Identify 4 sources that help frame and shape your understanding of the topic and address how you plan to answer the research question. State what category (background, exhibit, argument, or method) each source matches. Refer back to the BEAM frameworkLinks to an external site. if you are uncertain. Cite your sources according to APA or a style of your choosing.

• 1 Background source
• 1 Exhibit source
• 1 Argument source
• 1 Method source

Write a brief description for each of the four sources. In the description include:

• A summary of the article, resource or webpage;
• A summary of the source (journal, newspaper or website) and why it is reputable for this topic.
• Evaluate the source paying particular attention to the qualities below. Refer back to Ch 6: Evaluating SourcesLinks to an external site. for more. This section is the most important.

Note that you not doing any writing to reach a conclusion about your question; the emphasis here is on forming your question and identifying and evaluating sources that you could use to address it in a full research project.