Ask the Right Questions

The Ask the Right Questions lesson is mapped to the Research as Inquiry and Searching as Strategic Exploration Frames and helps students learn how to determine the scope of their investigations by creating an appropriate research question. This lesson introduces the first step in a research process and criteria used to refine a topic into an appropriate research question. To accomplish this, the lesson will:

  • Define a research question and the difference between a topic and a research question
  • Introduce the 5W criteria for refining an investigation
  • Discuss how questions are too broad, too narrow, or just right within a given context/investigation

Information Literacy Frame(s) Addressed:

Discipline(s): 
Multidisciplinary
License Assigned: 
CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License CC-BY-NC-SA
Other Attribution Information: 
The New Literacies Alliance is a multi-institutional collaborative effort that creates and shares a broad range of online information literacy lessons. These ACRL Framework-based lessons can be embedded in websites and LibGuides, and can be incorporated into most learning management systems. Sharing is key to our mission, so each lesson features a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license and our content is not tied to any one institution, so educators can use and adapt the material as they see fit.