Research Article

In this assignment, I wrote a Research Article for my UWP 001 course, titled ‘Student Behaviors and Practices to Improve UC Davis Cybersecurity Readiness’. As part of this article, I intend to address the specific research questions: 1) What specific student behaviors and practices impact the levels of cybersecurity readiness at a college? and 2) What is the current levels of adoption of leading student behaviors and practices that would improve cybersecurity readiness at UC Davis?

The assignment taught me that a Research Article is a very effective tool to help explain the significance of a research topic to our audience. It clearly articulates the specific research questions that we intent to address. I believe that it is very essential to define a meaningful topic for conducting research, backed by analysis of the relevance of it to the larger audience. Without this audience litmus test we would risk going doing an endless hole embarking on a project that would be devoid of the real benefits to the community at large.

The most challenging part was framing effective research questions that are clear (i.e., specific, and that do not require additional explanation), concise, focused, complex (not a simple yes/no questions), and arguable. Drafting these questions requires multiple iterations, however, once you do that well enough, then the rest of the research and analysis becomes extremely structured. The Research Article provides the opportunity to think about and include various structural elements like the introduction, research questions, literature review, methods, findings and discussion, conclusion, works cited, etc that could be further worked upon. The instructor and peer feedback was another helpful method that helped in improving the research article further, as it determined from a different perspective what could be an area of focus.