Do you wonder how to get students to come up with good research
paper topic ideas?
Very good. Wondering is where good topics begin.
Start with your teaching area
In college, your students 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.
Prepare students for the real world by requiring writing on
topics within the discipline they are studying. That's authentic
writing.
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 working 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.
You could have pairs or teams of students come up with a short
list of topics developed using your starter strategy. That would
ease them in to the process of developing their own individual
lists of ideas.
3 sets of ELA curriculum examples
Here are some samples related to ELA topics that average kids
might come up with using the "I wonder" strategy to
generate topic ideas:
- Who invented grammar?
- What I could do so I wouldn't have to take English
in college?
- When people will stop making books out of paper?
- Where did J. K. Rawlings grow up?
- Why do some kids think spelling bees are fun?
- How do people get jobs writing comic books?
Here's another set:
- Who needs to write research papers?
- What do I need to major in to get to be a technical
writer?
- When did people start speaking English?
- Where there are parks named for authors?
- Why do teachers think spelling is so important?
- How much money does Stephen King make from his books?
Here's a third another set:
- Who invented the ball point pen?
- What did people write with before pens?
- When did the people in Pride and Prejudice live?
- Where is the island in Lord of the Flies?
- Why are you not supposed to download songs and movies
and stuff?
- How long does it take 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 working thesis, 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.