This assignment is designed to help you understand the research process and to help you consider possible sources that you will use in your Exploratory Essay. Please complete tasks 1 and 2.

1. “Developing Your Research Process–Gathering Reliable Information” answer the following questions. Edit carefully and submit as a Word document:

What are the six steps for effectively creating a research plan?
What are primary and secondary sources?
What is the difference between popular and scholarly periodicals? What are examples of each?
2. For this part of the assignment, you will begin brainstorming for your Exploratory Essay by designing a concept map.

Concept mapping is a learning strategy that involves visualizing relations between concepts and ideas using graphical representations. It is a form of graphic organizer that consists of various circles or boxes (called nodes) each of which contain a concept and are all interlinked through linking phrases. The role of these linking phrases is to “identify the relationship between adjacent concepts” (McClellan and Broggy, 2009).

Some benefits of Concepts Maps for students:

Provide students with nonlinear visual ways to understand, produce, and represent knowledge.
Help develop higher-order thinking skills including analytical skills.
Facilitate the recall and processing of information.
Help students externalize their knowledge and show their understanding.
Make explicit structural forms of knowledge and relationships between concepts and therefore enhance students’ comprehension.
They attend to different learning styles.
They engage students in meaningful learning activities.
They are effective organizational tools students can use to organize their knowledge.
Visual representations of knowledge is proved to both stimulate and increase brain activity (Marzono, 1998, cited in Birbili, 2006).