Counseling: CNSL 592 Supervised Internship in Higher Education

Once you have chosen a topic, spend a few minutes planning your research strategy.  What do you already know about your topic?  What are questions do you have? Considering the main ideas (concepts) within your topic and synonyms (additional words).  Creating a plan such as the one outlined below will save you time and effort during the research process. 

Here is an example. 

TOPIC: Violence in the media and its effect on childhood development 

WHAT DO YOU KNOW? I have read articles that connect exposure to violence and violent behavior.  I have also read articles that find no correlation.

WHAT ARE YOU CURIOUS ABOUT? How does violence in the media effect boys and girls at various stages of psycho-social development? Are there differences by age and gender? Differences by medium? What other factors are involved?

CONCEPTS & SYNONYMS

Additional search words and strategies will come to light as you move along your research journey. Here is a worksheet to use and the class example.

Boolean search is a type of search that uses operators or modifiers (most commonly the words AND, OR, and NOT) to combine keywords in strategic ways to create simple or complex search strings that are designed to retrieve the most relevant information from a database or catalog.  It is important to try several different strategies and search strings with various keywords and phrases to give yourself the best chance of finding the most relevant and useful resources for your research assignment.