To Do

You’ve already completed an essay describing the challenges facing a specific category of students as they attempt to complete college. In this next step, we will find potential sources to help back up and support the claims in your essay.

The first step of research is to identify a question you hope to answer in your essay. Work with your tutor at the Enhancement Center to formulate a research question. Next, answer the following questions.

1. What is your research question?
2. What is your working thesis statement, based off of your research question?
3. What keywords can you use for your search?
4. Looking at a list of your library’s research databases by subject, identify a subject area that might be appropriate for finding articles for your research. Which subject area or areas will you search?
5. Now imagine that you want to find a newspaper article in order to get a sense of the most recent news on your topic (perhaps a local story or interview). Searching your library’s databases by format, name a database that would be helpful for this research task.
6. Go to the Cerritos College Library Database Tutorial. Watch the videos about basic and advanced searching in the database. Use the library database and EBSCO Search to find two resources that apply to your research question. Write a paragraph about each result describing what you found and how relevant it is to your search topic. (Be sure to write down the bibliographic information or use a program like Zotero to help keep track of your sources!).
7. Use the bibliography or works cited section from one of the two sources above to find another source related to your topic. Write a paragraph about this result as well, describing the source and its relevance to your research.