Brainstorming ideas and turning them into testable hypotheses is a hard step for students. First, students have a hard time deciding which topic they should do their research on. Therefore it’s important to plan ahead a couple weeks on which area they want to do their research on before actually introducing the assignment.
With a group the student choose to work with, one of the members in each group are to submit (add brainstorming worksheet). It’s also important to inform the students to schedule a meeting with either the TA or the instructor to receive feedback when they are about to choose their question. Since not all good questions are testable, the instructor will check if the question won’t be limited due to availability of data and feasibility of the work. In our class, professor Kurumada recommends using the ‘Providence’ corpus because it carries the data of 6 children of different genders.
Generating Questions
Before they begin brainstorming, there are several ways to help them generate questions:
- Show them the ‘Previous Final Projects’ under ‘Other Resources’ tab, in order to help generate ideas for their own project. When you scroll down, you can see the different categories that previous classes have done their projects on, so perhaps they can see other projects of topics they are already interested in!
- Another great way in which our class brainstorms ideas is to read through research papers on topics we feel interested in. If students are not used to reading a research paper, it would be a great exercise for them to go over How To Read A Research Paper and use this guide in summarizing this article. If you would like, you can make this as an assignment using this assignment sheet. As for finding research papers that are related to the students’ interests, let them know of Google Scholar or one of our TA’s Amanda’s website for useful resources.
- Two tips to give students are:
- Keep in mind CHILDES is a children and adult production database. You therefore cannot ask questions on either the early speech perception or comprehension, but only on production abilities.
- It is generally helpful to think about why children tend to make typical mistakes (or “non-adult like” uses of language).
Research Proposal
When the students are done with the Brainstorming worksheet, it’s time for them to begin drafting their research proposal. Using the Research Proposal Answer Sheet, each group will explain their research question and give reasons as to why they picked the questions. From the total of 3 questions, the students will only be able to answer questions 1 & 3 from this stage but after the ‘Operation’ stage, they will be able to answer question 2 as well. Also, it would be helpful for the students to refer to Research Proposal Example.
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