research skills

An Exercise in Writing Descriptive Field Notes for Anthropological Research

by Jelani Mahiri, Anthropology The production of “field notes,” descriptive writings about one's field research, is an ambiguous enterprise for most students, yet an important part of anthropological methodology. Thus a key issue for professors and GSIs is: How do we build on students' previous writing experiences, but move them beyond the notion of field notes as a personal journal, for example, to conceptualizing field notes as concrete description of events, interactions, people, and places within their research setting?

Sources Into Evidence; or, Rethinking the Research Requirement in R & C Courses

by Leonard von Morzé , English Students taking my reading and composition class may be better at uncovering sources than I am. Adept at searching Google Scholar and other online databases of articles...my most resourceful student writers continually demonstrate the capacity to plug appropriate and erudite-sounding quotations into their research papers...It might be useful, I thought, to get them to resist some of the familiarity they believed they already had with the research paper.

The Undergraduate Research Paper

by Karen McNeill, History That semester students completed the best batch of research papers I have ever received. I cannot say that the quality of student writing improved dramatically, but the quality of the research and analysis did.

The Campus as Laboratory: Teaching Students to Think Historically About the Built Environment

by William Scott, History To them, the history of architecture meant telling the story of the construction of a building, rather than thinking through the ways that campus spaces produce and reflect changing ideas and practices of education, gender, engineering, race, memory, ornamentation, and the environment, to name but a few subjects...I dug into my teaching background and realized that I needed to take my students on, of all things, a field trip.

Undergraduate Astronomy Journal Club

by Louis-Benoit Desroches, Astronomy My semester as a GSI for Astronomy 7A...reminded me of my time as an undergraduate taking the same type of course, eager to learn all I could about the wonders of astronomy. And indeed, students walk out of that course and the Berkeley astronomy undergraduate program in general with an excellent astronomy education. But just as I did when I was an undergrad, students here are asking for more.

Groupwritten

by Meredith Thomsen, Integrative Biology My students' papers clearly reflected the problems they had with group writing. For some, the sections appeared to be written by different individuals and then pieced together, with big swings in quality between sections; other papers seemed to be the work of a single student who had taken over the entire project...Spring semester, I decided to break the assignment into two sections.

Teaching Triangulation of Research Methods

by Jess Wendover, Architecture The exercise, while sometimes comically oversimplified, demonstrated the importance of not relying on a single method of gathering data in designing a space. The students really enjoyed the activity; everyone laughed at the conflicting demands for spaces within the theater...[and] they began to see the biases and drawbacks of each of the methods of inquiry.

Engaging with Primary Sources and Making Connections to Readings and Lectures

by Tania Martin, Architecture I determined that students unfamiliar with primary source research need models for conducting such research and hands-on practice. This became clear from my students' paper abstracts, preliminary object analysis exercises, and from class discussions. It was not enough to lecture about paintings, photographs, buildings, and forests — the students needed to engage with the materials themselves, and to learn to read various kinds of sources against one another.