Once you have your main inquiry question set, you’re ready to start investigating. You must have at least three sources of information as evidence for your report. These sources should be reliable, credible, and up to date.
Do Not Use:
- Any encyclopedia, including Wikipedia (these are already someone else’s synthesis report).
- Generic websites, like About.com or the like. If the site is merely a short article with links to a lot of other sites, don’t use it.
Instead get your evidence from any of these sources:
- Books, articles (newspaper, magazine), or other print media with a verifiable author and purpose.
- Websites with a verifiable author or organization (no anonymous Websites).
- Personal interviews with experts or people whose opinion impacts the topic you’re researching. Take careful notes and/or record the interview. Avoid any yes/no questions (those that can be answered with a yes, no, or one word).
- Data you collect (from a survey or an observation) For example, you might count the number of students in your lunch hour who take hot lunch versus ala carte. Or you might do an exit poll from ala carte to determine what students chose to eat from ala carte. Also, the nutrition tally chart is data that you collected.
- Data from the class survey. I will share the results with you. You would take only what would be evidence for your own report.
Tips:
- Take careful notes. Divide up the reading and research in your team.
- When you’ve found a source you want to use, go to EasyBib immediately and create the citation. Save that in your EasyBib account and/or copy it onto your team’s Wiki page.
