FCS 1100 – Research Methods: Understanding the Assignments

Interest Inventory

This assignment asks you to complete a survey prior to beginning the course to determine your academic interests. You'll post the survey to the "Interest Inventory and Discussion" forum, then respond to the surveys posted by other people in your learning team. Here's the reasoning behind this assignment: Since you're going to get together with your Learning Team to come up with a topic to research, you'll need to know what their interests are and try to identify a topic you'll all enjoy. You'll choose a topic during the first week of class.

Individual Discussion Forums

These forums allow you to explore various sources of information and to determine whether or not those sources are relevant to your final project. These are active learning assignments that require you to locate and analyze different resources.

Chapter Exercises

These exercises are designed to assess your mastery of material contained in the readings. They are web-based quizzes that you can take entirely online. You'll find the link to each chapter exercise in its respective week.

Learning Team Discussion Forums

Each week, you'll meet to discuss the sources that you've each discovered in your weekly individual assignments and, as a Learning Team, decide which of these sources are most appropriate for the final project. Then, you'll submit a report in the Learning Team Discussion Forum describing your rationale for including or excluding each source examined. Specific information about each LT discussion is contained in the respective forum.

Final Project

Each Learning Team will create a final project consisting of an APA-formatted outline of a term paper. This assignment will require you to do the following:

• Choose and limit an appropriate term paper topic.
• Clarify the specific requirements of the assignment.
• Identify the information needs of the assignment.
• Select appropriate resources to satisfy the information needs.
• Set up a Microsoft Word document according to APA guidelines.
• Prepare a works cited page, in correct APA format, that includes each resource chosen.

Please note that you're not actually required to write a term paper; you only need to perform the research tasks associated with a term paper project.

Final Project Presentation

Each learning team will present its project to the rest of the cohort by posting a narrated PowerPoint presentation to the Final Project Presentation Forum. Presentations should contain the following elements:

• A description of the topic of the project
• A detailed description of each of the sources used
• A rationale for source selection
• An evaluation of the project itself
• An evaluation of the process of creating the project

Individually, please respond to the Final Project Presentations of at least two Learning Teams (this is assuming that there are more than two Learning Teams in the cohort).