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appendix_a_drown_research.pdf

“You can’t keep it all in your head.”

—Louis Fried

Student writers often approach the start of a research project with mixed emotions. Excited by the prospect of discovery, they can also be daunted by what seems a complicated set of tasks to complete. Interested in learning more about a real world topic, they worry about not finding enough of the right kinds of sources. Ready to develop deeper understanding by thinking along with the experts, students fear not knowing how to comment on or use the work of experts in ways that their teachers expect. This book aims to kindle your inter- est by helping you tame the complexities of a research project. In this appendix, you will learn how to deploy proven project management skills to help you efficiently navigate your way through the process.

Even student researchers who understand the nature of research sometimes fear that they will be unable to successfully project manage their research. Like them, you may find yourself wondering how you will find and keep track of multiple sources of informa- tion. You may be concerned about how you will avoid procrastination, overcome some of the admittedly tedious tasks entailed in research, and ensure steady progress toward completion.

There is no getting around it: Writing a research paper is a sizable project. In some colleges and universities, you may have a 15- to 18-week semester to complete such a project. In accelerated programs, your research assignments are structured to be achievable in only a few weeks. In courses having a research assignment, you will usually be assigned the paper early in the course, and you may be required to prepare and submit intermediate sections of the assignment each week, with the final paper due at the end of the course. These intermediate assignments can help you stay on track with your research assignment because they will be drafts of the final paper you are writing in advance, which you then revise and edit before the final paper is due. In these cases, some of the project manage- ment work has been done for you. But you will still need to manage your progress from week to week and throughout the course.

Appendix A: How to Project Manage Your Research Project

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APPENDIX A

Key Project Management Strategies

The key to productivity in research, as in life, and at work, is project management. In order to be successful, you have to 1. Approach the project with the right mindset in the right environment; 2. Formulate a reasonable plan to complete your project by breaking it up into

smaller sequences of tasks; 3. Set clear, concrete, achievable goals for each working session and work until

you achieve them; 4. Monitor your progress to assess your execution of your plan and make

changes as necessary; and 5. Keep a research notebook.

We will look at each of these strategies in more detail, so that you can better understand how to implement them in your research project.

Approach the Project With the Right Mindset in the Right Environment If you believe any of the myths about research we discussed in Chapter 1, try to work actively to minimize their impact on your project. Keep reminding yourself that academic research is just an extension of research behaviors that you do in your daily life. Write project milestones on a calendar to demonstrate to yourself that you can complete the project in the time allotted. Trust that your existing knowledge, experience, and curiosity can initiate a fabulous research project. Aspire to enhance your own understanding and develop small insights into your topic rather than trying to solve a big problem. Embrace both your creative mind and your analytical one. Try to find an area of interest in the topic that resonates with your values and experience—one that you will want to share with friends and family, as well as classmates.

Because research projects require you to carry out somewhat unfamiliar and fairly com- plex tasks, it is critical that you do not try to multitask when you are working on your proj- ect. If you are like most people, you need to get a lot of things done in a short span of time. Multitasking seems like a necessity. But recent scientific research reveals that multitask- ing comes with high efficiency costs (Kuchinskas, 2007). Moreover, it is only productive when you are switching between two or more fairly routine tasks that occupy different channels of your brain (Anderson, 2009). So, it is true that you can fold laundry (a manual task) while watching American Idol (a visual task) and be pretty productive. Likewise, you can mow the lawn and listen to a baseball game at the same time and pay fair atten- tion to both. However, when the tasks are even moderately complicated, rapid switching between them drastically reduces your efficiency up to 40% and compromises the results (Anderson, 2009). Consequently, while it is possible to cook dinner while helping your fourth-grader with homework, your multitasking significantly increases the chance that you botch both dinner and homework.

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Working on your research project will require your full attention. You will need to cre- ate a single-tasking environment in which to work—one that minimizes distractions and enables you to enter into that hyper-focused state of mind necessary to work efficiently and think productively. Here are some concrete tips for creating a single-tasking environment.

• Put a door between you and everyone with whom you live, and make it very clear that you are unavailable. Workplace research shows that, on average, it takes workers 25 minutes to return to tasks once they have been disturbed (Anderson, 2009).

• Limit your channels of communication to the outer world. Sam Anderson (2009) reports that Americans who work on computers “keep an average of eight windows open on our computer screens at one time and skip between them every twenty seconds” (para. 14). Effective research requires more sus- tained attention than that. So shut down Facebook, close your web browser (except for research purposes), log out of chat, set your email program not to notify you when new mail arrives, silence your phone, and turn off the radio or TV. If you have to listen to music, make sure it is music without words (you do not want the language center of your brain to multitask in the back- ground when you are working on new or complex material made entirely out of words). Better yet, try playing a white noise loop through ear buds to shut out distracting sounds.

• Plan working sessions of about 2 consecutive hours at a time and try to change your activity within sessions (for example, from reading to writing; note taking to source finding) every 20 minutes or so (unless you are really on a roll with something). Why? Because research shows that attention flags after about 20 minutes of deep concentration, and productivity goes way down after about the 2-hour mark (Mittendorf & Kalish, 1996). In light of this research, you might wonder how you can work more than 2 hours at a time on your project, as you may sometimes need to do. Happily, research also shows that taking as little as a 5-minute break after a working session restores your ability to pay attention and work efficiently (Mittendorf & Kalish, 1996). So take a walk, have a chat and a snack, and then get back to it.

• Sit down to work having recently eaten a small snack that is high in pro- tein. Brainwork takes energy, and you cannot think well with a tired brain and an empty stomach.

Formulate a Reasonable Plan to Complete Your Project by Breaking It Up Into Smaller Sequences of Tasks To make sure you stay on track with your research projects, create a calendar devoted to your research project, based on the time you have to complete it (five weeks, 10 weeks, etc.). You can use any type of calendar you have at home or at work, or create an electronic calendar. On your research calendar, enter the due dates for any intermediate assignments related to your paper. Then, build in blocks of time during the week each intermediate assignment is due to work on that assignment. Finally, schedule additional research time of 30–60 minutes every day to make some progress on the other research and writing tasks nec- essary to complete the final paper. Figure A.1 provides an example of a research calendar.

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APPENDIX A

Figure A.1: Research project calendar

Research Project Calendar

Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday

Read Ch.1–Writing the College Research Paper.

Read Ch.2–Writing the College Research Paper.

Do “Evaluating Your Topic” activity for at least 2 topics.

Night off!

Do some grounding research on Google Scholar on both candidate topics.

Choose my Topic.

Consult with an online reference librarian to determine 3 useful databases for my project.

Update weekly research journal.

Read Chapter 3– Writing the College Rsearch Paper.

Locate and review 4 candidate articles. Start keeping a working bibliography.

Start collecting a list of specialized terms that experts who work on the topic use.

Write a list at lest 3 essential questions for my topic, each with 5 supporting questions.

Read and take notes on one of my articles. Create a concept map of its argument.

Write as much of my project description as I can.

Update weekly research journal. Reflect on my progress and make adjustments to my plan and working strategies as needed.

Notes

Locate and review 4 more candidate articles. This time targeted towards answering my questions.

Pay close attention to the “evaluating your topic” section.

First night of NBA season!

I want to see which topic is more interesting.

I reallly want to get an early jump on this project!

Week 2

Week 1

Week 3

Keep track of which search terms produce the most useful results.

Chloe’s dance recital.

Review Ch. 2– Essential and Supporting Questions.

Keep track of which search terms produce the most useful results.

Look ahead to Chapter 3–Finding and Working with Sources

Review Chapter 2 Write a Project Definition.

Creating and maintaining a project calendar is an incredibly useful tool that will help you structure your time, organize your project, and define manageable milestones.

Most research projects go through three overlapping phases: a planning and discovery phase, an analysis, synthesis, and interpretation phase, and a writing and submission phase. Each phase has several tasks that must be completed to move your project along. These tasks do not always follow in a step-by-step manner; at times they may overlap, or you may find yourself performing more than one task at the same time. But it is helpful to think about academic research as having these three principal phases. That way you can plan your time and not become so wrapped up in one phase of the process that you do not allow enough time for the other two phases.

The first phase of the process is the planning and discovery phase. In this phase, you select a topic and gather information to discover what others have written about the topic. In an accelerated course, for example, you should begin the planning and discovery phase in Week 1 or Week 2, at the latest. Although you may go back to conduct some additional

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APPENDIX A

research later, you should have found, acquired, and started to read a coherent set of sources early in Week 3 of the course, to allow yourself sufficient time to complete the second and third phases of the process.

In the second phase of the research process, the analysis, synthesis, and interpretation phase, you work with your sources to make sense of them. You read and take notes on them, gleaning both information and perspective; you try to determine the range of views on your topic and the uses and limits of the evidence that supports them; and you try to formulate your own conclusions as you prepare to write in response to the research you have conducted. This phase can begin as early as Week 2 in the course, and continue on in an overlapping manner until late in Week 4 or even early in Week 5. Your course guide or syllabus will help determine the amount of time you have for each phase.

Finally, in the third phase of a research paper, the writing and submission phase, you will draft and revise the paper, weaving together your ideas with those you encountered in your research. This phase will usually begin in the middle of the course and will continue through the last weeks, when your final research paper will likely be due.

Set Clear, Concrete, Achievable Goals for Each Working Session and Work Until You Achieve Them One of the biggest problems new academic researchers face is sitting down to a work ses- sion and not having a clear idea of what they are trying to accomplish in that setting. So they browse around in the library or on the Internet, randomly read some kind-of-useful articles, and before they know it, 2 hours have gone by and they have little more than a trail of links to follow for their work. The key to making steady progress on a research project is to have a clear set of achievable goals for each working session.

In Table A.1 below, you will find some sample task-oriented goals achievable in one 2-hour working session for each major phase of your project. As you dig into your project and read this book, you will encounter many more such goals. The key to setting good goals is to make them measurable and attainable. Since there is nothing more frustrating that consistently not meeting your goals, be specific and reasonable when you set your goals. Look for “three” articles not “some” articles, and certainly not 10 articles. Also set some process goals—goals that help you measure your progress and effort. Here are some sample process goals:

• Complete at least one task on my research project plan every day, • Invest at least 8 hours a week on my research project, • Meet with my professor or teaching assistant at least once a week to discuss

my project, and • Write 500 (or 750 or 1,000) words at least three times a week.

By setting task and process goals, you will always know what to do next, and you will have a good idea whether you are working effectively in your project.

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APPENDIX A

Table A.1: Some task-oriented goals

Phase Sample Tasks (You need not complete all of these.)

Planning and Discovery Phase Milestone:

Paper Proposal An notated Bibliography

• Consult with a librarian to identify the three best article data- bases for your project.

• Write, test, and revise a list of search terms to help you locate candidate articles for your source set in one or more of the databases you identified in an earlier session.

• Locate and review four candidate articles for inclusion in your source set.

• Use the references page of an article you have in hand to locate and review other related articles.

• Write a list of questions about your topic you would like to answer in your research.

• Assess the utility and suitability of the articles you have for your project.

Analysis, Synthesis, and Interpretation

Phase Milestone: Annotated Bibliography Paper Outline

• After having read some of the articles, write a list of questions that they answer (be sure to indicate the article and page num- ber where they are answered). Use this list to identify gaps in your research and try to find some articles to fill those gaps.

• Make a synthesis table of the four most important articles in your source set.

• Make a concept map or mind map of what you have learned so far.

• Identify the different “schools of thought” you have found so far. What do the different schools of thought agree on? Where do they disagree? Why? What school of thought do you think gets it most right? Why?

• Write a long paragraph criticizing the views of a prominent researcher and another one supporting the same prominent researcher.

Writing and Submission Phase Milestone:

Paper Outline Draft Draft Evaluations Revision Final Essay

• Write 500–1,000 words. • Write a long paragraph that introduces your reader to the topic

and provides him or her with an overview of the questions and concerns that drive research and debate on this topic.

• Write a section where you assess the uses and limits of one or more of the most important concepts researchers use to make sense of their data.

• Write a section where you report key data to your reader and teach him or her how to understand what that data means.

Monitor Your Progress to Assess Your Execution of Your Plan and Make Changes as Necessary Most successful people consistently monitor how well they execute their plans and make changes as necessary. You should too. At the end of each week, consult your project plan (it is on your calendar, right?) and check off the task and process goals that you have met.

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APPENDIX A

If a work process or strategy was particularly helpful that week, write it down so you can use again in the future. Then look at the tasks and process goals that you did not meet. Ask yourself why you did not meet them. Is it because you did not know how to complete the task, or the strategy you decided on did not work? Because something unforeseen hap- pened? Because you chose to do something else instead? Once you diagnose the reasons why you did not meet your weekly project goals, make changes in your plan (adjust your calendar, brainstorm some new strategies, invest more time, set different priorities) to ensure that you are back on pace by the end of the following week. We also recommend keeping a daily activity log (see Figure A.2 for a simple example).

Figure A.2: Daily activity log

Activity

Single-Tasking Minutes

Daily Total (in hours)

Week of: Sept. 30–Oct. 6

1.6 1.8 0.0 1.9 0.8 1.7 1.6

Answered 3 of the questions I wrote on Monday

Narrowed the scope of my project

102

Made synthesis table

Read and took notes on one article

112

Wrote project definition

Met with online TA

Searched for articles

Wrote 5 questions

Read and took notes on 2 articles

Weekly Total Goal Met?Activity Log

Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday

9.3 Yes

Keeping track of your time helps you to stay engaged and focused on your work, and provides a guideline to keep you from falling behind.

Each day, make entries into your log describing the tasks that you worked on, and how many single-tasking hours you spent working on them. For the log to be useful, count only the time that you spent actively working on the task. If you stopped working for a cup of coffee, or to answer the phone, the time you spent away from your work does not count. Nor does the time it takes you to get your focus back. Each week, when you review your progress, look at your activity log. Did you miss more than 1 day this week working on your project? You will need to do better next week. Were the tasks that you completed both important and urgent? If not, you gave priority to tasks that may have been easy or fun, but were either unimportant or not yet urgent.

For your activity log to be useful, you have to be honest with yourself. But the reward for being honest is substantial. By keeping track of your progress and your effort, and mak- ing changes as necessary, you avoid one of the major pitfalls of research—falling behind.

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APPENDIX A

Keep a Research Notebook (We Suggest a Physical, Rather Than Electronic One) According to Joseph Moxley (1992), author of Publish, Don’t Perish, “[M]aintaining a writ- ing and research notebook can help you write regularly, set goals, establish priorities, and organize your scholarly endeavors. If you tend to be a disorganized researcher, then the notebook can provide an invaluable focus for creative ideas. Although you can succeed without such a notebook, maintaining one can give you some control over what and how you write” (p. 37).

If professional researchers use research notebooks, you are probably convinced that you should keep one, too. But you are probably wondering why we recommend that you choose to keep a physical notebook rather than one kept on your computer. After all, this is the age of high-powered inexpensive networked computers. We can download journal articles in electronic form, we write on virtual paper, and even conduct our research at an online library. It is true that computers are wonderful things. We particularly love being able to electronically search for passages that we vaguely remember but forgot to take a note on (or worse, took the note and forgot to write the page number down!). But com- puters have serious limits for research purposes, screen size being the most important one. Even if you use your 40-inch wall-mounted HDTV for your computer monitor (and we would not recommend it; remember, you need to create a single-tasking space and someone is bound to want that TV fairly soon), it is hard to have more than one or two windows up and readable simultaneously. This limited reading space is a problem when you are trying to compare ideas across two articles and take notes at the same time— something that should happen quite a lot in your research project; you cannot help but run out of onscreen real estate. However, print out those two articles so that you can rapidly flip through their pages and you easily have room for two 8.5 x 11 stacks of paper, a legal pad, and your laptop on even small desks or tables. It is not uncommon that researchers and writers need to have rapid simultaneous access to several documents at once. However many other benefits digital texts have, paper is a much better medium for simultaneity than pixels.

Besides the limits of pixels when it comes to researchers’ need for simultaneous access to their work, recent research suggests that we may read more deeply, more comprehen- sively, and more comprehendingly when we read on paper rather than on screens. Draw- ing on the research of psychologist and literacy specialist Maryanne Wolf, writer Nicholas Carr (2010) reports that the invention of the book sparked a revolution in human con- sciousness. It is true that hunters, craftspersons, and religious contemplatives had trained themselves to pay close attention over long periods of time before the coming of the book, but with book reading,

deep concentration was combined with the highly active and efficient deci- phering of text and interpretation of meaning. The reading of a sequence of printed pages was valuable not just for the knowledge readers acquired from the author’s words but for the way those words set off intellectual vibrations within their own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associa- tions, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply. (Carr, 2010, pp. 64–65)

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When you conduct research, it is precisely these “intellectual vibrations” you need. You want to make your own associations, draw your own inferences and analogies, and foster your own ideas. “Why can’t these productive moments happen when I work on screens?” you might ask. They might, but it is less likely. Why? Because most of our screen reading is done on Internet connected devices that surround the text with animated ads, hyper- linked suggestions for what to read next, scrolling user comments, and invitations to log in to Facebook to “like” and share the page with our friends. All these elements vie for our attention and beckon us to link-leap to ever more interesting content on the next page, rather than inviting us to pay careful attention to and think about them.

We should not be surprised that it can be hard to concentrate on a single text when read- ing on the Web. Human minds have evolved to be distracted. Here is Carr again:

What draws our attention most of all is any hint of a change in our sur- roundings. “Our senses are finely attuned to change,” explains Maya Pines of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “Stationary or unchanging objects become part of the scenery and are mostly unseen.” But as soon as “something in the environment changes, we need to take notice because it might mean danger—or opportunity.” Our fast-paced, reflexive shifts in focus were once crucial to our survival. They reduced the odds that a predator would take us by surprise or that we’d overlook a nearby source of food. (Carr, 2010, p. 64)

We are hard wired for distraction. While that distraction can be really useful sometimes, it is not so useful when you are trying to conduct research. So for all these reasons, print out those articles, as well as your notes, drafts, and work documents.

Hopefully you are convinced that there are real benefits to keeping a physical research notebook. Now let us discuss what kind of notebook to acquire and what should go in it. We recommend a three-inch three-ring binder and at least six tabbed dividers. If you do not already have one, get a three-hole punch as well.

Much of the advice in the following section is adapted from Moxley’s advice guide to professors, who need to publish research frequently or lose their jobs. Like you, professors have busy lives outside of research—they teach, do administrative or committee work, advise students, take their kids to activities, and make dinner. Like you, the time they to dedicate to research is limited. What works for them will work for you. So what goes into a research notebook? Here is a section-by-section breakdown.

Research Notebook Contents

Section 1: Your project description

Describe your topic, your specific area of interest, and the research questions to which you are seeking answers. Update these as you learn more and your ideas and interests develop.

Section 2: Your calendar/work plan and activity log.

Keep these updated to track your progress, and reflect changes in your plan as your project develops.

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APPENDIX A

Section 3: Your reading notes, selected excerpts chosen from your sources, and one or two of the most useful articles in your source set.

We discussed effective reading and note-taking strategies in Chapter 4, but for now it is important to understand that you should not store every article and every piece of information you have in this section of the notebook. Part of making sense of your sources is to decide which specific parts of them are truly useful to you. Forcing yourself to cull only the useful concepts, information, and perspectives from your reading encourages you to think about the meaning of what you have read in the context of your own project. By keeping only the useful excerpts (cut and paste, but remember to keep track of the article in which each of your excerpts originates), you will better understand the implications of what you read, see more connections between researchers, and generate more ideas and insights of your own. You also reduce the number of pages to sort through when it is time to convey some of these materials in your essay.

Section 4: New ideas, insights, or questions that come to you as you are reading or writing.

It is inevitable that as you work on your project, new ideas will come to you. Include them in your notebook so that you do not lose them. Also record new questions or insights. Be sure that any new questions also get transferred to your project description in Section 1. Here you can also keep sketches, concept maps, free-writes, synthesis tables, definitions, or any other results of the idea-generat- ing/information-processing pre-writing techniques you use to make sense of your research.

Section 5: A working bibliography, including lists of useful databases and pro- ductive search terms.

You will need to keep track of the sources you use in your research. Since it can take a long time to write a references page (especially if you do not have all the citation information), we recommend keeping a working bibliography throughout the project instead of waiting until the end when you will likely be pressed for time. Whenever you find and download an article from a subscription database, record its complete citation in APA format (or the format your instructor has des- ignated for the course–refer back to Chapter 8 for discussion on writing formats). The database might supply you with a preformatted citation, you might find one on the first page of the article, or you might have to transcribe the information from the bibliographic record yourself. Whatever the case, you should enter the data into a separate word-processing file, or use special citation management soft- ware, such as End Note. Also write a few sentences explaining why you decided to read this source. What questions do you think it will help you answer? What new perspective will it offer on the topic? What new ideas or concepts does it bring to the discussion? Each week print out your updated working bibliography.

Finally, because you will conduct multiple research sessions over the course of this project, you should also keep lists of the most useful databases and search terms for your project. There is nothing more frustrating than finding a great database and some effective search terms and then not being able to remember what they were when you return to do more searching. So keep a database and search log. Use the following sample research log to create one of your own.

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APPENDIX A

Research Log

What are your research questions? Why is the online world so attractive to teenagers, such that teen use of networked communications technologies tends to be a key area of conflict between teens and parents?

What are the keywords and concepts in your questions? online, teenagers, parents, networked communications technologies, conflict

What are some synonyms and related words for the keywords and concepts in your questions? online: Internet, cyberspace, Facebook, Twitter

teenagers: adolescents, kids, youth, teens, boys, girls, tweens

parents: moms, dads, mothers, fathers, guardians

networked communications technologies: computers, laptops, smartphones, iPhones

conflict: fight, argument, war, struggle, battle, stress

Which new keywords are showing up in search results? social network sites, social media, affordances, social capital, new media, sociality

What new questions arise as I browse results lists? How are the affordances of new digital communications technologies and social networking sites, such as the Internet, smartphones, and Facebook, shaping the way teens work through the chal- lenges of adolescents?

Which databases produce the best results for my research? Academic Search Complete, Social Science Index

Which search terms produce the best results for my research? teens and social media, teens and social network sites, youth and social media, intergenerational conflict, and teens and social media

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