Step 2: Research, Research, Research!

You are at the next stage - science project research. By now you are well on your way to creating your project. You’re staying the course and moving through each of these important science project steps one by one. By laying the ground work now, you are doing yourself a big favor – you’ll save time and effort and have more fun in the long run by doing this preparation work now – great job!

After you have selected a topic, you begin what is called project research. This is research to help you understand the topic, express a problem, propose a hypothesis, and design an experiment designed to test the hypothesis.

Do use many references from printed sources—books, journals, magazines, and newspapers—as well as electronic sources—computer software and online services.
Do gather information from professionals—instructors, librarians, and scientists, such as physicians and veterinarians.
Do perform other exploratory experiment related to your topic.

Project Journal

If you haven’t done research before, don’t sweat it! It’s not as grueling and boring as it sounds – actually it can be quite fun, and not just for us science types!  Research really just comes down to finding out more about your topic. That doesn’t sound too bad right? And since you’ve picked a topic that’s based on an interest, you will actually want to find out more about it.

Now is a good time to start a project journal or notebook. It’s just a place to write down everything you want to remember about your project – science project research, any facts, ideas, or materials you might want, anything associated with your project.

This notebook doesn’t have to be paper – you could use the computer.

Depending on how you want to present your project in the future to judges or teachers, you might also want to have a timeline of discovery – meaning that you write down the date that you discover each fact you use in your project.

Another aspect of science project research is good record keeping - since you might not want to write down everything about a particular fact when you find it, it would probably be useful to you to write down where you got each fact – that way, if you want to know more details later on, you can quickly find the fact source and get anything else you want.  


Guide: Topic Research