Vintage Mac Clipart Japanese "Heaven and Earth" Scroll II: Earth. Enzan-Hoshigumi Co Ltd, Tokyo.

A graduate degree involves collecting and organizing large amounts of information. Setting up your computer so everything has a place is very important. Two folders of particular importance are your:

• Downloads Folder – unless you've changed it, everything you download (in particular your article PDFs and citation file downloads) will end up there. Get in the habit of cleaning it out occasionally.
• Documents Folder – this is where everything you want to keep should go and you should have organized your folders in a way that helps you to know where to put things and where things are. For each class and each project, you'll need a folder to keep your:
  1. references
  2. written drafts
  3. research source files, PDFs, scans, notes, etc.

Computers are fragile and storage is cheap, but your time isn't, so:

Make a backup plan using one or more of –

• External hard drive
• USB Flash drive
• Offsite (at work, school or a friend's place) as well as at home
• Cloud drive (Dropbox, Sync, Google Drive, iCloud, etc.)
• E-mail attachments

More sophisticated ways of backing up include:

• Incremental backups – as long as the drive is plugged in, it saves any changes at specified intervals
• Clones – make a copy of your whole system

Use your calendar to send reminders.

You should at least back up your Documents folder, which has all of your key research.

A researchable topic should - 

1. be focused enough that it can be answered in the number of pages we have available.
   • For example:
     • NOT immersion education.
     • Better - Does early language immersion produce measurably better results than late language immersion?
2. focus on one topic rather than going in multiple directions. 
   • For example:
     • NOT the effect of class size on student learning outcomes and how to write rubrics.
     • Better - Writing rubrics that effectively promote positive student learning outcomes.
3. show clearly the direction the research will take.
   • For example:
     • NOT class size.
     • Better - Do smaller class sizes result in measurably better student learning outcomes?

Writing a Good Research Question/Thesis Statement

• Includes example research questions, with initial search terms extracted. 

Example Search - A detailed description of how to set up a search.

Search Template - 

Research Question:

Which form of instructor feedback on ESL/EFL student writing is most effective in improving student writing ability?

Once we have a workable research question, we need to format it so it we can use it to search a database.

This tutorial shows how to set up a research question so we can effectively search an electronic article database.