Inquiry and Research Skills
Inquiry and Research Skills tests the full research cycle: turning a broad interest into a focused question, finding and evaluating sources, taking usable notes, and crediting what you use.
Step 1 - Ask an answerable question
- Broad: "birds and cities." Focused: "How does urban traffic noise affect the dawn singing of songbirds?"
- A researchable question is specific, not answerable by yes or no, and narrow enough for the space you have.
Step 2 - Search deliberately
- Choose keywords from your question, not full sentences.
- Boolean operators: AND narrows (noise AND songbirds); OR broadens with synonyms (noise OR traffic OR urban sound); NOT excludes (birds NOT poultry). Quotation marks lock a phrase: "dawn chorus."
- Know your source types. Reference works and textbooks give background; scholarly articles and government reports give data; newspapers and magazines cover current events. Primary sources (interviews, letters, raw data, eyewitness accounts) are interpreted by secondary sources.
Step 3 - Evaluate every source
Five checks:
- Currency: when was it published or updated?
- Relevance: does it actually answer your question?
- Authority: who wrote it, and what are their credentials?
- Accuracy: is evidence cited, and can the claim be confirmed elsewhere?
- Purpose: is it informing, selling or advocating, and who funded it? A domain ending (.edu, .gov, .org, .com) is a hint, never a guarantee.
Step 4 - Take notes that survive
- Record author, title, publisher, date, URL and access date the moment you take the note; reconstructing citations later is where marks disappear.
- Paraphrase in your own words and sentence structure, copy quotations exactly inside quotation marks, and keep a "my thinking" column so your notes contain ideas rather than clippings.
Step 5 - Synthesize and credit
- Group notes by idea, not by source, then write paragraphs that combine two or more sources.
- Anything quoted, paraphrased, or borrowed as an idea needs credit, both in text and in the reference list. Widely known facts do not.
- Patchwriting - swapping a few words while keeping the original sentence shape - is still plagiarism.
Worked example
A student researching urban noise and birds finds (A) a 2021 peer-reviewed university study reporting that traffic noise reduced songbird breeding pairs at tested sites, and (B) a 1998 personal blog claiming "birds love city noise because it drowns out predators." Reasoning: A passes currency, authority and accuracy checks and speaks directly to the question. B fails currency and authority, cites no evidence, and contradicts A. Neither source earns a place simply because it appeared on the first page of results.
Traps that cost marks
- Choosing a topic instead of a question.
- Copying notes without recording source details.
- Assuming a .org site is automatically unbiased.
- Citing direct quotations but leaving paraphrases uncited.