EPQ Guide: Finding and selecting sources

We have a wide range of books and subscription databases available - and you have the vast resources of the internet at your fingertips, so where should you start? Different resources are useful for different purposes.

Begin by looking at the home tab and the tab for your EPQ subject on our Recommended resources - Upper School guide.

As well as specific advice on resources to use for different subjects, this guide also contains advice on:

• Effective search strategies
• Books
• Databases vs internet
  • General database search tips
  • Searching JSTOR
• General internet searching: finding quality resources
• What about Wikipedia?

In some EPQs you might need to process raw data of some sort. This may be:

• PRIMARY DATA which you have collected yourself, for example through experiments, questionnaires and surveys, interviews or observations.
• SECONDARY DATA which someone else has collected (through methods like those above) and you have found, for example in a published study or paper, or from a database or website. For example, if you wanted statistics collected by the UK government on a wide variety of social and economic issues, you might look at the Office for National Statistics website.

Whichever sort of data you have, it is very important to think about and comment on how it was collected and how that may affect your results. A tool like the CRAAP test is just as useful for data as it is for other types of source, paying particular attention to study/experiment design and sampling.

A well-designed questionnaire can be an excellent way to collect relatively large amounts of primary data fairly quickly. A poorly designed one is a waste of everyone's time and can cause a lot of stress when you try to analyse the results and realise that the questionnaire did not work as intended.

In the interactive lesson (NearPod) below, Dr Foster leads you through how to design an effective questionnaire, and gives you lots of tips and advice. This lesson should take you about 10-15 minutes to complete.

Note: As Dr Foster recommends in his Top Tips, we strongly advise you to use Microsoft Forms (available through the Office 365 link on Oakham Start) not Survey Monkey for online questionnaires as the free version of Survey Monkey is quite limited. For example, you can only ask ten questions per survey and you cannot download your results to analyse them.

• If you need general help getting started in Microsoft Forms, have a look at the Microsoft tutorial page. Note that for data collection you should select New Form not New Quiz when given the choice.
• If you have a specific question either about Microsoft Forms or questionnaires in general, or are stuck, do contact Dr Foster or your supervisor.

Settings to check before sharing your Form...

Before sharing your Form, make sure you check the settings (click on the three dots at the top right of the Forms screen).

You will (I hope!) have thought carefully about the sample of people you are surveying.

• Is that just people from within the school, or does it include people outside? The default is that only people within Oakham School can respond, so if you are sending it outside the school you need to select "Anyone can respond". If you are sending a questionnaire to people outside Oakham School, please ask your supervisor to have a look first, both to confirm that it is suitable and that they are happy for you to send it to the people on your list.
• If it is internal, do you need to know respondents' names? Usually it is better to leave a questionnaire anonymous if you can. [External questionnaires cannot record respondents' names].
• You will generally want to tick the "one response per person" box to stop people completing the questionnaire multiple times (unless you have asked them to for some reason - e.g. a fitness diary they complete every week. In that case you would probably want to record their names so that you can match their responses from different weeks).
• Do you want to add a start and end date? If you do, be careful not to make the window too small or you may not get many responses.
• Do you want to be notified by email every time someone fills the Form in?

The presentation above contains slides from the AQA presentation Teaching slides: how to complete the production log (available from the AQA EPQ Teaching and Learning Resources website).  These slides are Copyright © 2020 AQA and its licensors. All rights reserved.

A downloadable copy of the Production Log can be found here, on the Home tab of this guide.

You might want to use this document to keep a record of keywords that have been helpful in your search.

This resource could help you to keep track of all the different sources you find. Once you start working with each source in more detail, you might also like to use something like the Investigative Journal to organise your notes.

One way to keep track of your investigation which you may have used before and wish to revisit here. Use one page per source and don't forget to insert a citation at the top of the page. If you choose not to use it, think about what you will use instead.

Whether you are using print or online resources, you need to consider whether you think they are suitable for your inquiry and why. Consider the:

• Currency: How important is the age of the resources you use? This will matter more in some subjects than others.
• Relevance: Does it address your core question?
• Accuracy: How do you know it is accurate? Have you checked it against other sources?
• Authority: Who wrote it? What qualifies them to write in this area?
• Purpose: Why has it been written? To sell you something? To convince you of a point of view? Or is it academically neutral?

The resource below can be used for CRAAP testing, and is particularly useful for websites.

An example from Dr Foster showing how the Investigative Journal and CRAAP test might be used together.

It is so frustrating when you are under pressure to write up your work and you suddenly realise you can't find all the information you need to reference a source! Ideally you would gather all the information you need as you go along, but what is the minimum you need to gather to make sure that you can reconstruct the reference at the end?

• For books: Title, author, publisher, date and place of publication and the page number of any useful quotes. There are no shortcuts here!
• For websites: full URL and date accessed. However, if you think the site is likely to change then gather all the referencing info at the start
• For online articles (from a database), make sure you have the permalink if you are offered it, and the date you accessed the article. The title of the article and the database you accessed it from should be enough to locate it again if there is a problem with the link later. Don't rely on a URL - for some databases this will just take you back to the home page.