How have you developed or demonstrated this competency this semester?
Sourcing information
Give an example of a time you used digital tools to locate the information you needed to complete an assignment. How did you determine your research question? How did you evaluate the sources you chose? How did you know this was the most trustworthy information? How did you present the source in your work?
During my first-year seminar, we were required to complete a micro mini-research project which consisted of us choosing a topic and finding sources on them. We were required to reflect on our topic and what we found and continue to refine our topic. To locate these sources, we learned how to use OneSearch, a resource that Wesleyan provides for us and allows us to see what sources we as students have access to. When we plugged in our topics, a multitude of sources would come up and we were required to filter through them. One way that we were able to narrow our sources down was by applying filters to them, whether it’d be journals or peer-reviewed or a certain time period. By making our search more specific, our sources went down and we were able to have a more focused research question or topic.
The process of choosing a question was picking a story that we did in class and using the themes to come up with a question. My topic mostly focused on the intersections between sexuality and immigration and how these two identities coincided with each other. I was really interested in how being a part of the LGBTQ+ community as an immigrant impacted people’s mental health, their family dynamic, and their lives in general. After I found sources, most of my evaluation was done simply by choosing peer-reviewed journals to ensure that they were strong and were already accepted in most of academia. Because they were already a part of OneSearch, I trusted that most of them were reliable.
This project was small and low stakes, so most of our presentation was reflection and writing about our experience learning how to do research. We were also required to do annotations for some of our sources and incorporate how these sources were relevant to our project. We were also expected to log how our research question was changing throughout this short process and demonstrate that we knew how to navigate the Olin Library. Overall, I learned a lot about how to do research at Wesleyan and the resources that are open to us.
Cosing and learning digital tools
Transference
