Do you wonder how to get students to come up with good research
paper topic ideas?
That's very good because wondering is where good topics begin.
Start with your teaching area
Prepare students for the real world by requiring writing on
topics within the discipline they are studying. That's authentic
writing.
In college, they will be required to write about biology in biology
class and marketing in marketing class. If they go to work in
the monkey wrench plant, they will write reports having to do
with the manufacture and sales of monkey wrenches.
Students do much better with topics that grow
out of their school studies even when they are not
gung-ho students. They may not have absorbed much sitting in class,
but your students probably know more about To Kill a Mockingbird
(which they were assigned to read but didn't) than they can find
out about the foot fungus problems of the African wildebeest in
six weeks.
Teach a strategy for getting started
The first thing students need to be taught is that the point
of a research paper is to answer a question. The short
form of the answer is the thesis of the research paper.
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Most students don't do well at pulling questions out of the ether.
They need to be taught some strategies for coming up questions
and made to practice them until they develop a habit of looking
regularly for ideas that they could develop into a paper.
The old-fashioned journalists questions can be used to structure
strategies for finding potential research paper topics. However,
students will catch on more readily to the fact they can explore
topics that interest them if you phrase the starting points like
this:
- I wonder who
- I wonder what
- I wonder when
- I wonder where
- I wonder why
- I wonder how
The research paper topic idea can (and should!) be phrased as
a single sentence at this point.
One way you might begin
If you were going to teach the research paper in the spring term,
a easy way to get students prepared is by assigning them the task
of coming up with at least one potential research paper a week
starting in the fall term.
For college-bound juniors and seniors, you might want to require
two research paper topic ideas a week: one from your class and
one from some other class.
You could use a class period early in fall to introduce the concept.
Have students work in teams, with each team to generate one list.
3 sets of ELA curriculum examples
Here are some samples related to ELA topics that average kids
might come up with:
- I wonder who invented grammar.
- I wonder what I could do so I wouldn't have to take
English in college.
- I wonder when people will stop making books out of
paper.
- I wonder where J. K. Rawlings grew up.
- I wonder why some kids think spelling bees are fun.
- I wonder how people get jobs writing comic books.
Here's another set:
- I wonder who needs to write research papers.
- I wonder what I need to major in to get to be a technical
writer.
- I wonder when people started speaking English.
- I wonder where there are parks named for authors.
- I wonder why teachers think spelling is so important.
- I wonder how much money Stephen King makes from his
books?
Here's a third another set:
- I wonder who invented the ball point pen.
- I wonder what people wrote with before pens.
- I wonder when the people in Pride and Prejudice
lived.
- I wonder where the island in Lord of the Flies
is.
- I wonder why you're not supposed to download songs
and movies and stuff.
- I wonder how long it takes to write a novel.
None of those ideas is a research topic yet. They are all just
ideas that might become a research topic. What is important
about them is that they get students started thinking about topics
that have at least a tad of interest for them.
You still will have to teach students how to get from the idea
to the research paper topic, but that is much easier if students
have primed their brains by thinking about ideas before you begin
that discussion.
Place of journalizing/microblogging
If you want students to keep plugging away at developing ideas,
you have to look at their work and provide feedback on
it regularly. (Treat the work as informal writing; don't grade
each item.)
Gathering research paper topic ideas is a great authentic use
for a journal. Journalizing, which people who don't own
dictionaries call journaling, requires relatively little
writing, which appeals to your writing-adverse students, and produces
something they can use.
As a practical matter, you are better off having students use
an online medium such a class Twitter
account or an Edmodo
microblog rather than a paper journal. There would be no papers
for you to lug or students to lose. The entries would be kept
short. And there would be opportunities for comments from you
and other students.
Students going on to college would get a great boost from having
developed the habit of looking for research topics in classes
throughout a semester.
Published 30-Apr-2010; updated 15-Jun-2010
