Process Journal

The Process Journal is an essential working tool for developing and completing the Personal Project. You should maintain the process journal throughout the stages of the project to keep notes on your investigation, planning, action, and reflection. In this way, you will demonstrate your working behaviors and academic honesty. It is a record of progress maintained throughout the project.

The process journal can be in any format that you choose--a website, audio recordings, video recordings, a written record. It SHOULD NOT BE A DAILY LOG OR DIARY. You might want to change formats for each stage of the project.

On completion of the personal project, you will select a maximum of 10 individual extracts from your process journal to submit as appendices of your project report. Extracts can be in many formats, but focus of the selection should be extracts that are directly relevant to the process that you have undergone in the development and completion of the project.

The extracts should clearly highlight how you have addressed the objectives of project. These extracts will not be directly assessed, but will provide evidence of the levels of achievement awarded for the project.

Media

Using media resources is probably the type of research most comfortable and familiar for you. Media resources are any type of visual or print reference created by someone else and available to you in print of digitally. These include:

1. books/newspapers/magazines

2. internet sites

3. documentary films

4. how-to videos

Interview

Many of the topics students choose for their Personal Projects don't necessarily lend themselves to easy internet research. However, the help of another person - someone skilled in the area you're exploring - can be invaluable.

Interviews enable you to ask questions, seek advise, and utilize the experience of another person. Interview-based research helps make your project unique - the information you get from whomever you interview isn't going to be something that just anyone can look up on the internet!

Survey

Surveys can help you find out what people know or believe about a topic. They can be very useful to you as data, or to help you generated ideas for your topic. In particular, they can be helpful in figuring out ways to incorporate principled action into your project - what do people want or need to know/receive help with in relation to your project? In what form would they like to receive that help?

There are many different ways to survey people - digital surveys, paper surveys, verbal surveys. You can survey people you know, specific groups, or random samplings of people. Again, the information that you get through a survey is going to be unique - it's data no one else has - and will help to make your project original and special.

Observation

Research through observation and experience involves becoming personally involved in the topic that you want to research.

This involves going to the place you're researching, watching someone who creates what you want to create, or observing a situation you're interested in. If you're doing a project to gather resources for a food bank, this might mean going there and watching a delivery, seeing who comes to pick up food, when they come, what they need. You might help pick up or deliver food, and experience what the workers there experience. If you're doing a project on bullying, this may involve watching your peers in the cafeteria, little kids on the playground, or the dynamics on the bus. Observation is one of the most personal types of research and, again, produces highly personal results.