Teach Information Literacy & Critical Thinking!

C. Topic Selection Ideas

1. Problem:

Students often find it difficult to come up with manageable research paper topics.

See Expected Learning Outcomes (below) and Methods (middle column) for help with this problem.

2. Expected Learning Outcomes

After using one or more of the methods or links provided in the next column, all students will select preliminary manageable topics or arguments for their research papers.

3. Methods:

Generate topic ideas from news stories:

Suggest that students scan current news sites like Digg, the New York Times (all articles freely available to the public), or the Los Angeles Times.

Links:

These sites can help students get started on this process:

- Pre-Writing Questions (Online Writing Lab, Purdue University)
- More Pre-Writing (Invention) Questions
  - (Online Writing Lab, Purdue University)

4. Assessment:

Road to Research:

- Starting Points: Pretest (Guest)
- Quiz (Guest)

Note: Links above are to archived copies of pages in the Internet Archive, as the "Road to Research" is temporarily unavailable as of 16 Sep 2015 due to revision work on the UCLA Social Sciences Computing Center's website.

In addition, this tutorial has not been maintained by the UCLA Library since Summer 2011, and some portions may be out of date. It is used here as an example.