Sunday, February 12, 2012
When to Start Evaluating Your Research Materials?
The chapter 6, “Researching Your Topic,” talks about the processes of researching topic. It lists all the details for efficiently researching topics: gathering research materials from maximizing our search of library and Internet resources, conducting research interviews, evaluating our research materials, and so on. However, I was wondering why the process of evaluating research materials is not before the process of the maximizing research. For example, I followed the processes to maximize my research topic, and I got a lot of information from various search engines. Unfortunately, I got stuck on the process of the evaluating research materials because I could not answer to the critical questions, which is based on the principle of “three evaluation criteria: reliability, validity, and currency.”(Coopman 116) Especially, some of the author’s background and purpose are not clearly revealing in these resources. Therefore, I don’t know whether I could use these materials from uncertain of author’s information for my research topic. Accordingly, when should I start to evaluate my research resources? gathering materials first or after?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
That could definitely be a problem when it comes to internet research. Too much information that you are never sure is correct or true. Even if you only look at credible sources, you should make sure that they are offering truth and not just their opinion on the subject. I have found in the past that scholarly journals are a good source of online information. There is even a place to click on the Sierra College library site that will only show you the scholarly journals. These provide a lot if expert opinions that you can use for your research.
ReplyDelete