You’ve already completed an essay describing the challenges facing a specific category of students as they attempt to complete college. In this next step, we will find potential sources to help back up and support the claims in your essay.

The first step of research is to identify a question you hope to answer in your essay.

1. Work with your tutor at the Enhancement Center to formulate a research question.
2. Next, write the answers the following questions.
   • What is your research question?
   • What is your working thesis statement, based off of your research question?
   • What keywords can you use for your search?
3. Visit a Wikipedia article related to one of your search terms. Write a paragraph about your findings. Is the Wikipedia article helpful? What other insights does it give you? Look at the sources and citations at the bottom of the page. What other leads can you find through these links?
4. Go to the Cerritos College Library Database Tutorial. Watch the videos about basic and advanced searching in the database. Use the library database and EBSCO Search to find two resources that apply to your research question. Write a short paragraph about each result describing what you found and how relevant it is to your search topic.