For your final project, pick a crime topic/issue from among those discussed in the course or something that interest you. Be sure to go into depth about your topic. Your topic should be manageable enough so that you can read all of the major articles pertaining to.
Visualize how your ideas relate to each other, either on some scrap paper or digitally.
Once you know your topic and your research question, you need to figure out how you're going to find more in-depth information.
First, pick out the key terms from your research question:
What effects on the education system does racial discrimination have?
Next, you'll want to brainstorm some related and alternate terms for these keywords to give you some variability in your search strategies.
Effects | Education | Racial (Race) | Discrimination |
---|---|---|---|
Impact | Public schools | Ethnicity | Prejudice |
Results | Charter schools | Specific examples: black, Hispanic, etc | Bias |
Graduation rates | K-12/primary | Advantages/ disadvantages |
|
Completion rates | Secondary school | Inequity, inequality | |
Retention rates | School funding | Affirmative action | |
Education gap | Socioeconomic clusters in school zoning | ||
First, you develop and narrow down your topic -- the general idea of what you're going to be researching. From that, you need to develop your research question, i.e. what is the question you are attempting to answer by doing your research? This, in turn, will form the basis for your paper's thesis (your claim/argument/answer) which you'll explicitly state in your introduction.