• paper significance
• technical content
• tie between
  • originality
  • organization and writing

Choosing a Research Topic

Some Pitfalls

• Difficult to anticipate what will be most important to others
• Do not understate or overstate context, motivation, significance
  • Typical characteristic of papers by first-year students
  • Example from hypotentical student paper: Introduction proceeds:
    • Need to promote human relations, world justice, peace, and harmony
    • Terrorism presents a counter theme to vision of world salvation
    • Data collection and organization needed on terrorists to identify threats
    • Computer networks provide valuable mechanism to collect data
    • Need to order data to organize information and identify main threats
    • Arrays provide one way to organize data
    • Bubble sort one way to order data in arrays
    Conclusion: The bubble sort is vital tool to promote world salvation!
  • Rather little research is truly revolutionary
    • For most of us, our scholarship provides incremental knowledge in small steps
    • We may be lucky to have one or two papers of long-term significance throughout our careers
    • Both comments certainly apply to me; you need to decide if either applies to you
  • Some evidence that men tend to overstate significance,
    women tend to understate
• Do NOT blindly emulate experiments or approaches geared for other types of institutions
  • Your expertise relates to what you know (at your school)
  • Needs and opportunities for teaching classes of 500 students simply are different from those for classes of 10 students.
  • Approaches associated with multiple-section courses may be different from those for single-section or alternate-year courses.

Some Opportunities

• Identify a topic that addresses a need you observe
  • Clarify why this is a need
  • Does need apply only locally or more generally?
• Consider appropriate scope of project
  • One or two labs or classes
  • One unit within a course
  • A major section of a course
  • A new approach or focus for an entire course
  • A new emphasis, a shift of content, or new pedagogy for several courses
  • Work within your resources (time, equipment, energy, other commitments, local constraints)

created September 2, 2003 last revised September 29, 2003

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