A. How do I find a good research topic?

All your group members should read the discussion below on bad and good project topics first. Time spent on discussion of a good research topic is always worthwhile.

Your group members should meet as soon as the group is formed and brainstorm on what is a topic that:
    (1) is of interests to most of you
    (2) has interesting research questions or hypothesis that can be studied quantitatively
    (3) is able to be implemented by the number of people in your group, during the period of the statistical project (8-10 weeks).

The distinction between a research topic and a research question (hypothesis) can be illustrated through the following hypothetical group discussion:

Tina: so what do we do for our project?
Fred: I don't like experimentation, let's do a survey.
Amy: we shouldn't be talking about what types of study we want first, right? Let's find an interesting topic first.
[invisible instructor]: good Amy, 5 points. Actually, she is too good to be a real student.
Rick: you know what is interesting, how to get a high project grade without hard work… I would really like to find out about that.
[invisible instructor]: Rick, basically speaking, that can not be fully implemented before the end of the semester.
Tina: I heard something interesting last weekend. A friend of mine said that Columbia has the most famous alumnus among the whole Ivy League. I simply can't believe it.
Fred: That's might be true.
Rick: I would have thought Harvard or Princeton.
Amy: It would be interesting to find out and actually prove that is true.
Rick: It seems to be an OKAY topic to me.
Tina: I kept thinking how one "measures" the number of "famous" alumnus.
Fred: We can survey people on whether they have heard of anyone famous from Columbia, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, etc.
Amy: we can't just ask them that. Maybe someone has heard of A, but hasn't heard of that A was graduated from Columbia.
Rick: we can make lists of the most prestigious alumnus from these institutions and ask around…
Tina: emm, that might work…
Amy: I think we should control for the field of those famous alumnus, such as politician, artists, scientists, etc.
Fred: good point. We also shouldn't conduct the survey only on campus. We need a random sample of general public.
Rick: how do we get that?
[invisible instructor]: yet a lot of discussion is needed, they are on the right track… Maybe it will turn out that this idea is not implementable but at least they had a good discussion, involving important concepts such as "project topic", "control", "random sample", "survey", etc. Remember it is all about active learning.