For your pleasure, here are the various materials for tonight's workshop. As always, feel free to download, copy, print, shred, or otherwise abuse these materials.

 The Broad Picture—Your Topic 

We shall begin with the quest to find a topic. Several avenues can lead to topics, among them the reading that you do. Often articles examine topics that are limited in some way, looking at a limited context or a limited period of time. Let's look at such an example, which is a paper that I recently published with a colleague about the development of international posture in 5th- and 6th-grade elementary school students.

A second avenue is to consider an area of interest, which could of interest to you personally, to some external agent like your organization or school, or even simply to the field in general. Some years ago I worked some with puppets, during which I observed different people react in different ways to the use of an inanimate object like a puppet. I wondered why such differences in reactions occurred, which was—I believe—primarily of interest to me. However, we have a paper in progress here at the CPC about the placement exam that you took upon entering GRIPS. Why? Because that exam is of interest to our CPC, of course.

 Brainstorming 

Given that little peptalk, now we can begin pondering topic ideas. Of course, this can take the form of an individual activity, but you can also incorporate your friends and colleagues (note the catchy image to the right!).

An interesting and perhaps more productive and creative use of time is brainwriting, which avoids the phenomenon of conformity pressure.

Here is yet another set of ideas about how to brainstorm in a group, and they are worth considering the next time (or times) you have to collaborate on a project.

Some of you might be wondering whether there are applications available to assist you in this process of brainstorming. The answer is, of course, an emphatic YES. The following list includes free software you might give a try.

 Answerable Research Questions 

This particular page will prove useful, I think. From the Digital Advisor at at Michigan State University, we have some fine examples of what makes a research question answerable.

An important facet of research questions is that they must be focused. Positing a research question about the effects of global warming would require you to write several books, I suspect. On this fine handout from the good folks at York University

Allow me to add a caveat. An answerable research question is by its very nature not yet answered. Several years ago I had a student come to me with a research questions about which she said, "I already know the answer." If so, then there is either (a) no sense doing research on that question, or (b) some confusion about how research is ordered chronologically. Research is not a "chicken or egg" conundrum.

 How to Answer Your Research Questions 

Finally, we arrive at the crux of the matter: Given a particular research question or questions, how do you answer it(them)?