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Research paper topic ideas

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.

The trick is to get students thinking regularly about potential research paper topic ideas.

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.

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.

The tricks discussed here for finding ideas for research papers can also be used to discover speech topic 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.