Research as Inquiry

Invention and Generation
Research Involving Data and Sources
Research as Inquiry Assignment
Other Links

When students approach research as a form of inquiry, they engage in an iterative process that involves generating questions, seeking answers, writing about inquiry topics, and then asking new, often more complex questions. Research as inquiry frames research as an ongoing learning process. These sources provide support for the inquiry process, with a focus on idea generation and conducting primary and secondary research.

Invention and Generation:

If you’re not assigned a topic--or sometimes even if you are--you’ll need to begin by figuring out what to write about.  What kinds of ideas, questions, or concerns will drive your writing? What if you think you have no ideas or nothing to say?  The sources below will help you think about where “good ideas” come from and suggest some techniques for generating writing that asks questions and explores ideas.

• Johnson, Steven. “Where Good Ideas Come From” 
  Where do you get an original idea to write about?  It’s tempting to romanticize inspiration and to think that great ideas just come out of nowhere.  This video looks at where most ideas really come from and argues that invention comes from thinking about and connecting with ideas other people have already established. New ideas come from the connections we generate from existing ideas, and continue to connect to each new idea that we have, in a potentially endless process of idea generation. This video provides a quick illustration of connecting ideas and helps students understand how they might come up with an idea for further inquiry.
  
  
• Lessner, Steven and Collin Craig "Finding Your Way In: Invention as Inquiry Based Learning in First Year Writing"
  Inquiry can sometimes mean researching texts and sources.  But good inquiry starts with finding ideas and topics to write about, discovering questions to ask, and ways to go deeper into the topic. This detailed article reviews a variety of invention strategies to help students generate topics and explore their existing knowledge and experience. Discussed strategies include reading rhetorically, freewriting, focused freewriting, critical freewriting, flexible outlining, bulleting, visual outlining and auditory/dialogic generative outlining. These strategies are reviewed in clearly delineated sections, allowing for easy excerpting or in-class use.
  
  

• Elbow, Peter. “The Loop Writing Process.”  Writing With Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. 59-77.
  Elbow describes a process for taking writing on a topic in new directions.  Part of this process involves generating new thinking and part of the process involves reflecting, organizing, and revising.
  
  

Research Involving Data and Sources:

• Driscoll, Dana Lynn. "Introduction to Primary Research: Observations, Surveys, and Interviews"
  This article reviews the theory and practice of three essential methods of primary research: observation, survey, and interview. It can be assigned in its entirety or excerpted for projects that use only one or two of the covered primary research strategies. This is a great resource for a mini-ethnographic research assignment or to illustrate the differences between primary and secondary research.
  
  

• Haller, Cynthia R. "Walk, Talk, Cook, Eat: A Guide to Using Sources"
  Written as a dialogue between a student researcher and an “online professor,” this article breaks the research process into four metaphors: walking, physically or digitally locating information; talking, putting various sources of information into conversation with one another; cooking, processing sources in new ways to address the needs of a specific project; and eating, growing and learning through the research and writing process. This article’s focus on clear metaphors makes it readily digestible and easy to excerpt.
  

Recommended Assignment:

Please click through these links to explore the other suggested readings categories:

• The Writing Process
• Rhetoric, Genre, and Discourse
• Multimedia/Multimodal Composition

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