I shape what Research 101 teaches across its four weeks. The whole second week is one problem, and it is the problem almost every student underestimates: turning something you are interested in into something you could actually answer.
Students arrive with a topic. Sleep. Social media. Air quality. Concussions in sport. Then they say they have a research question, and what they have is a subject heading.
The test that takes ten seconds
Here is a question we use in the second week, written by a real student and lightly cleaned up: does social media affect teenagers?
It sounds like a research question. It has a subject and a verb and a question mark. Now try to imagine the spreadsheet you would need to answer it. What are the columns.
You cannot, and that is the test. Every word in it is a category rather than a measurement. Which teenagers, where, how old. Affect how: sleep, grades, mood, friendships. Which social media, used how much. There is no version of that spreadsheet, so there is no version of that study.
If you cannot describe the table your answer would go in, you do not have a question yet. You have a topic.
Three things a question needs
We teach it as three, because three is what fits in your head while you are writing:
- A population. Who exactly. Not teenagers. Grade 11 students at one school, or amateur runners over 40, or municipal air sensors in Scarborough.
- An outcome you could measure. Not affect. Minutes of sleep on a school night, or score on a specific scale, or parts per million.
- A claim you are actually making. Whether two things move together is a different claim from whether one causes the other, and they need different studies.
Run the social media question through those and it turns into something workable. Do Grade 11 students who use their phone in the hour before bed report fewer minutes of sleep than those who do not. That is narrower, it is less exciting to say out loud, and it is answerable, which the first one never was.
The mistake that is hardest to see
The third item on that list is where good students get caught, because the sentence sounds fine.
Take: does a 20-minute walk before an exam improve Grade 12 students' exam scores. Population, outcome, both fine. Then the plan is to survey students about whether they walked and compare the scores.
That design cannot answer that question. Improve is a causal verb, and a survey of what people already chose to do can only ever show that two things appeared together. The students who walk before an exam are probably also the students who slept, ate, and started studying in October. You would be measuring the kind of person who walks, not the walk.
This is not a small technical point. It is the single most common way a student project ends up unable to support the sentence it was built to prove, and the fix costs nothing if you catch it at the question stage and a whole project if you catch it at the end.
Point at every noun
The exercise I would give anyone reading this, and the one we set in the second problem set, is this. Write your question down. Then point at each noun in it and say out loud how you would measure that thing.
Stress. Engagement. Wellbeing. Performance. Quality. Every one of those is a concept, not a measurement, and each one has to be swapped for something a person could actually record. If you cannot do that swap, you have found the part of your project that was going to fail in March.
Then check whether it is already answered
The last step is the one students skip because they are afraid of what it will say. Search for your question before you commit to it.
Finding that someone has already answered it is not the disaster it feels like. It is twenty minutes that saved you three months, and it almost always hands you a better question than the one you started with, because published work ends with the authors listing what they could not do.
What you are looking for is not an empty space nobody has studied. At your stage that usually means it is unanswerable or nobody thinks it matters. You are looking for a question that has been answered somewhere else, for some other group, in some other year, and could be asked again here.
Smaller is not worse
The hardest thing to convince a student of is that narrowing is not a downgrade. A question about one school with sixty responses is a real study. A question about teenagers and social media is a headline, and nobody, including funded researchers with laboratories, can answer it in that form.
Every good project you have ever read was narrow. The interesting part is what it is a case of, and you get to that by answering something small properly, not by asking something large badly.
Week 2 of Research 101 is five lessons on exactly this, ending in a workshop where you leave with a written question and the reasoning behind it. The course is free and assumes you are starting from zero.