How to Develop a Research Topic

When beginning your research, you will start out with a general topic. For example, if you are an EDU (education) student, you might want to write about teaching children to read, because that's what you have found is the most fun lesson to teach in your student teaching experiences. Once you have a general idea what you want to write about, you need to make sure your topic is narrow enough to be workable. You do not want your topic to be so broad you could write a whole book on it or so narrow you can't find any information.

What is an example of narrowing your topic?

In the above example we have taken a broad topic (teach reading) and added some "parameters" to it. We've specified 1) who we are teaching to read (early chapter book readers) and 2) how we will teach them (with active learning strategies). 

Remember:

1. If your topic is too broad you'll have so much information to stuff into your paper that you won't know how to organize it or even where to start.
2. f your topic is too broad, your reader may expect you to talk about aspects of the topic that you never address.
3. If your topic is too broad, you'll have to write way more pages than your instructor assigned to cover everything you need to say. Most instructors won't accept that. Or they may take off points for it. So, you'll end up having to cut out tons of stuff you took time to write in order to make your paper fit the proper length.
4. If your topic is too broad, you will spend a lot of time finding articles you will never use because you eventually have to cut stuff out as in #3 above.

Worried your topic is too broad? 

1. Type the topic (like teaching reading) into a library search engine. If you get thousands of results, your topic is probably too broad. Look at some of the titles of those results to get an idea of "sub-topics" you might focus on.
2. If you type the topic into a search engine and you find whole books are written on the topic, it is definitely too broad. But go find some of those books. Look at their chapters. See if any of the chapter topics give you an idea of something more specific to focus on.
3. Sit down and brainstorm all the different angles you might take on your topic (ex. teaching reading: to preschoolers, to middle grade children, to adults, teaching people to read critically, helping people with learning disabilities read, different strategies to teach reading etc). If you can list lots of different angles, any one of those might be a good way to narrow your topic - but it definitely needs to be narrower.

1. Ask yourself who, what, where, when, why and how questions about your topic. Using the above "Too Broad" topic as an example, when thinking about teaching reading, we can ask who? (early chapter book readers) and how? (active learning strategies). If we were writing an historical overview of strategies for teaching reading, we might have narrowed our focus by asking "when". Then our topic might have narrowed like this: A comparison of how reading was taught in the 1970's vs 21st century strategies. If we were interested in comparing how reading is taught in other countries, we might have narrowed our topic by asking "where." Then, our topic might have been: Teaching reading in third world countries.

2. Create a mind map. Write down your broad topic in the middle of a piece of paper. Then brainstorm associated ideas. The terms you write down will likely be good directions to take when narrowing your topic. Here is an example: