Worksheet: Developing Your Research Topic

Short Assignment

This worksheet is designed to help students develop a thoughtful research topic. Students go through a series of steps, questions, and background reading to help them better understand and refine a research topic.

Considerations

  • Even if you supply paper copies of this worksheet, consider also sharing a digital copy so that students have easy access to the resources linked within it. Some of these resources are purchased and made available through the PSU library and cannot be found easily with a search engine.  Linked resources include:
  • This assignment should be done before students choose a research topic and not submitted with the final research project.
  • This activity, lightly edited, is derived from the Research Exploration Exercise by Susan Archabault and is reproduced here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.  The use of this Creative Commons license means that you are also welcome to edit the activity to better suit your course.

Resources