I was working today with a student who had originally wanted to write about health. She had become interested in health programs taught in high schools, coming up with the following proposal (my feedback in blue):
- I am studying health and wellness.
- Because I want to find out how…health education is taught in schools and what sort of effort is really put into helping young children understand its importance.
- In order to understand what…this means for the future of America and the amount of obesity compared to healthy individuals in our society.
- In order to explain to you why…there is still hope for change in the health of American society.
Feedback: What is your overall question? By “health education” do you mean nutrition education? Will you focus on elementary school, middle school, or high school when you say “young children”? Will you focus on childhood obesity? I like that you’ve just focused on school education and its influence on young children. What if, for example, you find that schools are teaching what they need to teach…where will you go from there? Will you examine complications that come with following the nutrition education received in school (busy society and pre-made food, family habits, school cafeteria offering poor choices, tv, etc?)
This student then ended up changing topics and focusing on Autism, wanting to discover if vaccines were, indeed, linked to the onset of this disorder. After a week of research, she had become overwhelmed by a topic that was legitimately in stasis, not knowing how to make sense of a large body of information with many opposing viewpoints.
She also had become overwhelmed by the research itself, not knowing where to look for information and becoming discouraged that other possible causes of autism were not being discussed. Contrary to what this student thought, however, the information was there but unaccessed. Sometimes, it’s all in the re-search: going back and looking again, expanding search resources, using new key words, and/or refining the original idea or research question.
We brainstormed other possible key words: pervasive developmental disorder, genetics and autism, gluten-free, possible causes of autism, autism spectrum disorders, etc.
We accessed databases offered by the school. If you are lucky enough to have access, SIRS Researcher, Infotrac, and Ebsco are wonderful for their ability to categorize according to source type. After 15 minutes, we were able to find 10 additional scholarly sources, newspaper articles, media files, and magazine articles.
Ahh, the sweet success of re-search.
