Directions for the Manager of the Investigation

You need to be able to quickly find what you have learned so you can reference or cite the information. Keeping track of what you know and don’t know avoids repetition of tasks and helps guide the project.

 

Develop a portfolio or a catalog system to record and arrange your notes. There are many approaches to arranging your portfolio. You can have a section for each research question, with each section having subsections such as Background, Methods of Research, Results, and Conclusions. There can also be pages for keeping notes, progress reports, letters, illustrations, charts, and so forth. Eventually, essential information will be organized into a report.

 

Special Considerations for Issue Analysis

If you are analyzing an issue, the researchers will be collecting information about people’s viewpoints. You may want to develop a classification system for categorizing the different viewpoints (see table below). Narrow the viewpoints to five or less to make the project more manageable (see Value Descriptors).

Person or Group	Viewpoint or Position	Value