Speaker 1: Hello ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Peoples here and we're going to talk today about how to create your areas of focus for your research paper and how to create research questions to help guide that research so you have something that's going to, a path that you can follow to continue your research or conduct your research. The first thing is choosing your topic. Now many of you already have a general topic that you've chosen that could be the holocaust, it could be Pearl Harbor, it could be Adolf Hitler, but many of you have already chosen a topic. But what you need to do now to, the next step in creating areas of focus is to create a web. So you can see in this example that there is the holocaust here is what we're going to be using as an example. That's my topic but I need to focus it, I need to narrow it down to areas of focus. And so what I did is I took the holocaust and I thought of all these different things that are connected to it, concentration camps, leaders, reasons for the holocaust, the ghettos, Joseph Mengele and the experiments, punishment of the Nuremberg trials, the Adolf Hitler and his role, and Kristallnacht. Now because of this I have an idea of different categories that are connected to the holocaust. What I want to do now is I want to narrow my topic, I want to choose three of those things, three topics that connect. I don't want to just pick random parts of my web but I want to pick three topics that connect and that those will become my area of focus. So when I'm looking at my research packet that looks like this, those areas of focus I can plug into my research packet. And so you can see for this one, this example, I took for the holocaust I might be interested in finding information about Adolf Hitler, about reasons for the holocaust being my second order of topics, and then concentration camps. And so I could put those in order based on a sequence that is logical. Now here's another example, I could do the same topic but I have different areas of focus. I could have Adolf Hitler, then concentration camps, and then my third area might be Joseph Mengele and the experiments that he conducted. I could also have, here's another example where I could have reasons for the holocaust, some of what it was like in the ghettos, and then concentration camps. Those are my subtopics. So once I have my overall topic, holocaust, Pearl Harbor, Battle of Midway, then I need to create this web so that I can think of some subtopics. Then I pick three of those subtopics and I put them in a logical order. Now the next step is to write questions and writing research questions are very, it's a difficult skill, it takes a lot of practice. This is the first time you've done this. You've had attempts, earlier attempts in the year with ComArts, but this is the first time you're actually trying to apply those things and so it's okay if you don't get it right away. Ask your teacher for help, nobody gets it right the first time, so the worst thing to do is to just not write any questions. What you want to do is make sure you have questions and then we can talk about how to tweak them so that they're better questions. We're going to talk though right now about how to write good questions. Let's say I have my topic, now I have my areas of focus or my three subtopics, you can see those here, Adolf Hitler, concentration camps, and Josef Mengele. What I want to do now is I want to write three open-ended questions for each subtopic. I have to make sure though that my questions stay on topic. So if I'm going to ask three open-ended questions about Adolf Hitler, I can't have one of my questions be about Josef Mengele in that section. So if I continue here, here's an example. So my first subtopic, Adolf Hitler. My first open-ended question might be something like, who was Adolf Hitler? Then when I go to my research, I'm going to be looking for examples, evidence that show what Adolf Hitler, who he really was. Question number two, another open-ended question, what were some of Hitler's beliefs? What were some of Hitler's beliefs? Again, I'm not going to be looking for like, when was he born? I'm not going to be looking for when did he die? I'm looking for, because my subtopic is focused on the Holocaust, I'm going to be looking for what were some of Hitler's beliefs? Because that question is going to lead us into why he believed the Holocaust was necessary. And then, what things influenced him to hate Jewish people and other groups? That's an open-ended question that's going to lead us to information about the Holocaust. It's going to lead us to information about why he would choose to do something as horrible as this. Here's my second subtopic, or my second area of focus, the concentration camps. And these are examples of open-ended questions for that. What were concentration camps? What were they? That's an open-ended question. It's not a yes-no question. It's not a question that can just be answered with one piece of evidence. It takes a whole bunch of evidence put together to answer that question. For what reasons were they created? And what was life like in the camps? And then the last one here, Joseph Mengele and the experiments. Who was Joseph Mengele? What was his purpose in the camps? And then, what were some of the experiments he conducted? You might need to, if you don't know much about Joseph Mengele, maybe you don't choose him as a subtopic. But maybe he's someone that you know about and that you're interested in, and that's something that you choose to do. But you need to be able to write those open-ended questions about each subtopic. What that means now is I can then go to Google, and I can look up Joseph Mengele, and I can also look up things about who he was. I can read examples about what his life was like. I can read what his purpose was in those camps, but I can use these questions then to guide my research. So then when I find information that answers those questions, I jot that down into my notes, and then I keep track of the sources so that I can use it later on in my paper. Let me know if you have questions. This is a quick instructional on how to narrow your topic and then write those questions. Let me know if you have questions, or Mr. Downs, if you're from Mr. Downs' class, let him know if you have any questions. Thanks.