Taking the first step is always the hardest. However, by successfully coming up with a simple research topic, you and your group will find the next steps of the research to be much easier.
Here is a brainstorming exercise worksheet that can be completed as a group: Brainstorming Exercise
Generating Questions
As you can see in the worksheet, the first important step is to gather ideas on what topics your group are interested in. Here are several things to keep in mind while coming up with the topic and questions:
- By going into the ‘Previous Final Project’ page under ‘Other Resources’, you can scroll down to see the different categories that the class had done their projects on. Note that these categories aren’t the only options, and there are many other categories you can come up with.
- Another great way to come up with questions is to read through research papers on topics you are interested in, because it is always a good research question if it can add new piece of knowledge to an existing body of research. If you are new to reading research papers, feel free to read: How To Read A Research Paper.There are a lot of tips in the guide, but one of the helpful tips is to highlight while you read so when you go back to find important details, you wouldn’t need to read again from the start! To find research papers that are related to your interest, try using Google Scholar or one of our TA Amanda’s website, which has other useful resources.
- Would you like to try summarizing research papers? With the guide, try summarizing this article using this assignment sheet. The article we’ve attached is color coded for efficient reading!
- Keep in mind CHILDES is children and adult production database. You therefore cannot ask question on neither the early speech perception nor comprehension, but only on production abilities.
- Lastly, it is generally helpful to think about why children tend to make typical mistakes (or “non-adult like” uses of language). Asking yourself the why-questions can be useful in generating awesome questions!
Is It Testable?
Unfortunately, not all great questions can be tested using CHILDES database due to various limitations. Here are some things to make sure the question your group comes up with is addressable:
- Sometimes you need to change/modify your research question depending on the availability of data. For instance, if the target structure doesn’t appear in the dataset, there is nothing much you can do.
- Your group need to decide whether the research is looking at:
- one child or multiple children? If so, why?
- only children or adults too? If so, why?
- We highly recommend using the Providence corpus because it carries the data of 6 children of different genders. Use this corpus to check if your target expression is indeed available. Even if you were to use a different corpus because Providence doesn’t have what your hypothesis looking for, make sure to note and cite the corpus you used, and report all the necessary info (How many kids did you check? How old were they? etc.).
- Also, schedule an appointment with your professor or TAs to receive feedbacks on your hypotheses and see if it can be easily addressed.
Research Proposal
As you and your group is done figuring out which topic to do research on, it’s time to begin drafting your research proposal. Using Research Proposal Answer Sheet, your group will write down the research question and give reasons as to why to picked that question. You would be able to answer question 1 and 3 from this step but for question 2, but you will be using the materials from the next step ‘Operation’ to answer preliminary data questions. If you have trouble knowing how to answer the questions, please refer to Research Proposal Example.
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