Leading research question: What are the socio-economic and environmental impacts

Leading research question: What are the socio-economic and environmental impacts of transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources?
Overview
This project asks you to examine an issue from a multitude of perspectives by compiling research into an annotated bibliography and analyzing your findings in a literature review. Through this project, you will learn how to:
Refine broad topics into guided, specific research questions
Conduct, organize, and cite academic research using scholarly databases and publicly available texts
Use Generative AI tools to assist with scholarly reading comprehension and analysis
Analyze varying sources to form a holistic view of a specific social issue
Concisely summarize all sources into a literature review
This is a research-intensive project designed to sharpen your critical thinking skills and provide a basis for future research and analysis tasks you will undertake throughout college and beyond. The process of formulating a research question, conducting and organizing extensive research, and analyzing your findings transfers directly to almost all professional fields. The research you do in this unit will directly benefit your Unit 3 project.
Minimum Requirements
Annotated bibliography with:10-12 total sources, properly cited in MLA (see the ASU Citation guide for help)5+ academic, scholarly, or peer-reviewed sources
150–300 word annotation for each source
1–2 page literature review
Submitted in 12-point Times New Roman font
Submitted to Canvas before class on the assigned due date
Project Requirements
Your issue and research question are clearly identified and defined
All sources are directly relevant to your chosen issue
All annotations identify the source’s author, audience, purpose, and findings.
All annotations identify how the source is relevant to your research question, contains personal reflections or questions about the source, and connects the source to other texts in your bibliography
Literature review contains a summary of research methods (where + how you found your sources)
Literature review synthesizes main findings from all sources (big takeaways)
Literature review contains original insights and analysis based on research and findings (what you think)
Literature review acknowledges any biases, shortcomings, unanswered questions, and/or future research necessary to the issue at hand
The Steps
There are several essential steps to completing this assignment. As you take these steps, you will be prepared to succeed by class activities, assigned readings, support documents, and in-class instruction.
Step 1: Pick a Topic The first step of this project is to choose a topic you are interested in or that intersects with another class or area of research you are involved in. A topic is a broad and vague area of study. Examples of topics are :
Generative AI
Environmental Justice
Computer Science
Indigenous History
Social Media
Because topics are so broad and intersect with so many other academic, social, and cultural contexts, it is difficult to conduct guided and holistic research on a topic alone. The next step is to place your topic within a specific context, creating an issue. Step 2: Turn the topic into an issue When people have differing beliefs about how we should think about or act upon a topic within a specific context, we have an issue. For example, given the topic of Generative AI, these are some contexts that present different issues:
Generative AI’s use in college classrooms
Generative AI’s impact on creative industries
Generative AI’s potential to displace human labor
Ethical development of Generative AI
Generative AI and non-English speakers
Once you’ve identified an issue you find especially interesting or relevant, you can formulate a research question to guide your research.
Step 3: Formulate a Research Question After choosing an issue, you’ll use a research question to guide your research process. A good research question should be open-ended and provide opportunities for you to engage with multiple perspectives. If your question has a yes/no answer, it’s not a research question. Here are some research questions based on the issues listed in the previous step:
How can Generative AI be incorporated into college classrooms in a way that benefits student learning and promotes critical thinking?
What actions can consumers of entertainment and media take in order to protect industry employees from being displaced by Generative AI?
What college majors are most impacted by the introduction of Generative AI into potential careers?
How can users of AI tools pressure companies developing AI to do so in ways that guarantee ethical labor practices?
How are developers of Language Learning Models utilizing data from languages other than English to guarantee linguistic equity in their tools’ training and usage?
You should also consider who your question/issue impacts (i.e., who are the stakeholders)? For example, in the research question, “How can Generative AI be incorporated into college classrooms in a way that benefits student learning and promotes critical thinking?” some stakeholders are:
College students
College faculty, including educators, administrators, and tutors
AI developers
Potential employers of college graduates
People publishing and researching in academic fields
The more specific your research question, and the more stakeholders you identify, the more guided and streamlined your research process will be.
Step 4: Conduct and organize research After you’ve formulated a specific research question, you’ll conduct research on your issue by using a variety of academic, scholarly, and publicly available sources. As you conduct your research, you will organize all of your sources into an MLA-formatted annotated bibliography. ASU Library Guides defines an annotated bibliography as “an organized list of your sources that includes additional information about the sources. This information can be descriptive, explanatory, and/or evaluative in terms of quality, relevance to your own research project, as well as explorative in how the work provides options for further research.” There are no concrete rules for what goes in an annotation, but for this project, your annotations must include:
The author(s)
The audience(s)
The text’s purpose
The text’s findings or conclusions
Any potential bias or shortcomings
Relevance to your own project/research
Any personal reflections, thoughts, or questions about the text
If possible: connections to ideas from other pieces of research
For this project, your annotated bibliography must include 10–12 total sources. At least 5 of your listed sources must be from academic, scholarly, or peer-reviewed journals. The rest may be from any credible and research-backed sources relevant to your issue. Annotations must be between 150–300 words.
Step 5: Write a literature review After you’ve finished your annotated bibliography, you will compile your findings into a literature review. A literature review is defined by the Purdue OWL as “ a document or section of a document that collects key sources on a topic and discusses those sources in conversation with each other.” Keep in mind, a literature review is more of a report on the research than an argumentative paper; you are not making and defending a claim as much as you are summarizing the research surrounding a given issue. For this project, your literature review must:
Directly state your guiding research question
Summarize where and how you conducted research
Synthesize the main findings of all your sources
Use your research to generate your own insights and analysis on the issue
Point out any flaws/biases in your research sources and process
Your literature view must be between 1–2 pages double-spaced.