🤩QUESTIONNAIRES: How to make them (by steps)? #structure

🍂 Before writing questionnaires it is recommended to search for international or local communities in social media, where people are plausible to contribute your research, like YRA community (https://t.me/yracomm). It ensures an adequate amount of the participants.

🍂 Do not make questionnaires with a big number of questions involved in there. Beginners are more likely to overlook that the respondents may be idle or too busy to answer the numerous questions in a row.

🍂 Those templates must include questions without biased context. For instance, people will perhaps answer positively questions, like "Do you eat healthy food?". Try to hide your purposes, so that participants will sincerely answer neutral questions.

🍂 Use likert scales appropriately. It would be more helpful if there were variants as more as possible (strongly disagree 1 point, disagree 2 points, neutral/don't know 3 points, agree 4 points, strongly agree 5 points).

🍂 The most important is launching pilot test. Ask some of your buddies to check your questionnaire and give feedbacks. It would be much profitable to design variants even for lazy people. You can use this advices for surveys as well.

🧠 FIELD SPOTLIGHT:

Neuroscience — The Science of YOU
Neuroscience is one of the fastest-growing fields in science — and it's more accessible to student researchers than most people think.

✏️ Neuroplasticity & Learning
Your brain physically rewires itself when you learn something new. Researchers are studying how sleep, stress, exercise, and even music affect this process. High school students can explore this through behavioral experiments and literature-based research.

🔍 The Teenage Brain The prefrontal cortex — responsible for decision-making and impulse control — doesn't fully develop until your mid-20s. There's enormous research being done on how this affects risk-taking, peer pressure, academic performance, and mental health in adolescents.

💻 Brain-Computer Interfaces
Companies like Neuralink are working on connecting human brains directly to computers. The ethical, medical, and technical questions this raises are wide open for research — especially in philosophy, ethics, and computer science crossovers.

💤 Sleep & Cognition
Why does pulling an all-nighter destroy your memory? How does REM sleep consolidate information? Sleep neuroscience is booming and incredibly relevant to student life.

📚 Mental Health & the Brain Depression, anxiety, and ADHD are being studied at the neurological level — not just psychological. Understanding the biology behind mental health is one of the most important research frontiers of our time.

🔬 Entry points for student researchers: surveys on sleep habits, literature reviews on neuroplasticity, or behavioral experiments testing memory and attention.

#useful

🍂 Various effects in researches explain why you should be meticulous! #additional

👀 The Confirmation Bias:
Most researchers hunt for materials, patterns or other information which confirm their scientific hypotheses or ideas. For this reason, their investugations are often questionable and biased. To prevent the potential contradictions, formulate the position with denying materials, which might go against, and smoothly write it down in subtext.
👀 The Experimenter Effect:
It is a widespread phenomenon across psychologists and sociologists when they are subconsciously able to instill their aims in participants by specifically providing database or promoting ideas in specific consistency. For instance, while writing questionnaire, explorer may express questions, wherein first answer is unfavourable (with negative constructions) and another one is more preferable.
👀The Hawthorne Effect:
Participants are subconsciously inclined to alter their behaviour or answer "appropriately", when they know that they are observed. It causes to behave in accordance with the presumed expectations. Although their faked answers would be recognised, researches would, otherwise, fail to identify natural responses.
👀 The Publishing Bias:
Journals seldom aspire to select explorations, where the outcomes are predominantly or totally positive, rather than picking up a suitable and relevant ones. Therefore, it would be admittedly better not to get over bad results, but write attractive and positive sides of your conclusion.

Interactive Game: Research or Fake?

🎮 GAME: REAL STUDY OR COMPLETELY MADE UP?
We will give you 5 “study titles”.
✍️Your task: guess which ones are REAL published research and which ones are made up. Comment your answers for each one 🤓

1. "The Effect of Background Music Tempo on Math Problem-Solving Speed in Adolescents"

2. "Do Plants Grow Faster When Spoken to in Different Languages? A Comparative Study"

3. "Correlation Between Shoe Size and Leadership Ability in Corporate Executives"

4. "Sleep Deprivation and Its Effect on Emotional Regulation in Teenagers: Systematic Review"

5. "The Impact of Doomscrolling Before Bed on Next-Day Academic Performance in High School Students"

#reminder

🤖 FIELD SPOTLIGHT: AI Ethics — The Research Field That Can't Grow Fast Enough
AI is advancing faster than our ability to understand its consequences. That gap is exactly where researchers are needed — and where young voices matter more than people realize.

1️⃣Algorithmic Bias
AI systems trained on biased data produce biased outcomes. Facial recognition software has been shown to misidentify darker-skinned faces at significantly higher rates. Hiring algorithms have penalized women. Researching how bias enters AI systems — and how to detect or remove it — is one of the most urgent areas in tech right now.

2️⃣AI & Mental Health Chatbots are increasingly being used as mental health support tools. Do they actually help or do they cause harm? What happens when someone in crisis interacts with a poorly designed AI? These questions are wide open.

3️⃣Deepfakes & Misinformation
AI-generated images, videos, and text are becoming nearly impossible to distinguish from real ones. Researchers are studying the psychological and social impact of synthetic media — and how to build tools that detect it.

4️⃣AI in Education Does using AI tools improve understanding or create dependency? What are the fairness implications when some students have access and others don't? These are questions that affect you directly.

5️⃣Who Is Responsible?
When an AI makes a harmful decision — who is accountable? The developer, the company, the user? Legal and ethical frameworks for this are still being written in real time.

💻 You don't need to be a programmer to research AI ethics. Philosophy, psychology, sociology, and law all intersect here.

🔭Empiricism: One of the Major Theories #additional

Empircism is characterized by its single apex principle that true knowledge comes from fair observations and transformative generalizations based on observations. It does not always consider the possibility to feel or touch something, but if experimenters could generalize it from root observations. It includes Bayesianism, Hypothetic-Deductive (HD) methods and inductivism.

1️⃣ Inductivism is a study structure for empiricism. It initially establishes theoretical process confessed by discussions, hypotheses and theories. Afterwards, experimenter should organize various observations that will be generalized and must draw the probability of the research hypothesis.

2️⃣ Hypothetic-Deductive Method is close to Inductivism, but it includes testimonies and empiricism as the quintessence of this methodology. Individuals make hypotheses and select any of them to test by holding observations and basing on Bayesianism (explains that the probability of something is correlated with the confidece of statement).

If you can't understand Empiricism, you can watch this video — click 🔗

✍️ Literature Review & Common Mistakes #additional

🚫 Wrong approach.
— Literature Review is mistakenly percepted as an 'accumulator' of scientific investigations. However, individuals must not collect, but extract main ideas and highlight your research identity by comparing the prominent researches and outlining their inferiorities or spotlights their horizon didn't reach.

❔Improper stream.
— It is significant not only to enhance coherence & cohesion in investigations, but additionally create a good structure of literature review. Mostly, individuals write about comparisons and just write cases apart. Instead, find really firm works on your topic and compare them, then underline faults or lacks, and present your own hypothesis smoothly afterwards.

ℹ️ Bringing up sources.
— Students subconsciously overlook sources with results that contradict their ideas. Let's be honest, only nullifying the consideration of the opposite researches might utterly increase the consideration of yours. Furthermore, do not forget about analyzing sources you have searched as long as methodologies can marginally and abruptly differ and, therefore, your citation will probably seem inappropriate.

📖At long last, Literature Review! #structure

How to review the literature:

1️⃣You can start your conspectus by setting a few keywords and skimming sector-specific books, materials, journals, and conference papers. You should collect relevant sources to write their appearances towards your idea or topic. Hence, it is better to generate questions before, during and after reviewing.
2️⃣Identify specific information and focal point of researches you analyze by defining their structure and and subdividing board information. Afterwards, ask yourself disclosing questions, like "What specific problem does this research address?", "What are the major findings?", "How evidence is organized to support arguments? Is it persuasive?".
3️⃣To take notes, create your own template that would briefly reflect main criteria for your literature review. It shoud blossom in easy access in later use.

How to form literature review:
1️⃣At first, it is adviced to bear the purposes of literature review in mind and establish primary research question which will lead this part of the research.
2️⃣The criteria for all literature reviews: it is based on the main theme of enquiry, it follows a logical order, and its arguments are referenced with the support evidences of existing literature.

😵‍💫 Critical Rationalism: One of the Major Theories #additional

Karl Popper's Falsifiability Theory (Critical Rationalism) is the main killer of all the psychological hypotheses, because it claims that a theory cannot be entirely proven true, but can be proven false by particular experiments.

For instance, the statement "All swans are white" is falsifiable, because a person can find black swan to prove it wrong. Instead, we can say the vast majority of swans are white and it would be true by empiricism.

The main reason why the promoted approach has been noticed by many scientists is a possibility to consider psychological theories, like of Freud's one. Because if the established statement cannot be proven true or false, it is the pseudo-science or non-science statement. Furthermore, it contributed to religious and abstract arguments to be classified as something out of science.

Karl Popper helped deny the approach of Inductivism and state that science is developing by theories, that are being questioned afterwards, not accumulating and endorsing the exceptional facts which construct universal laws then.

📼 Watch this — click.

🎮 WOULD YOU RATHER: RESEARCHER EDITION
Pick A or B for each question and drop your answers in the comments. ⬇️

1️⃣Would you rather…
🔤 Spend weeks reading everything written about a topic before touching your own research
🔤 Jump straight into collecting data and figure things out as you go

2️⃣Would you rather…
🔤Work completely alone with full control over every decision

🔤 Collaborate with a team even when it means arguing over directions

3️⃣ Would you rather…
🔤 Study something deeply personal and close to your own life
🔤 Study something massively impactful even if you have no personal connection to it

4️⃣ Would you rather…
🔤Your results confirm exactly what you predicted
🔤 Your results completely surprise you and change your whole perspective

5️⃣ Would you rather…
🔤 Publish in a prestigious academic journal that specialists read
🔤 Share your findings in a way that reaches thousands of ordinary people

6️⃣ Would you rather…
🔤 Research a problem that could realistically be solved in your lifetime
🔤 Research a fundamental question humanity might take 100 years to fully answer

✏️The way you can make your writing sound academic! #important

1️⃣The engaged students are keen on Youtube channels, research books & materials, and academically loaded articles. After all, it is the best way to foster academic English and strengthen writing skills.
💻Therefore, watch Youtube (or other social media) videos, like the playlist "Writing in English at University", never omit researches and be aware of BBC updates. The advanced approach will not only help understand heavy ideas, but, by the way, come up with new ways you can smoothly express them!

2️⃣ Always practice. Individuals often underrestimate the multiple undisclosed causes what make academic English arduous to handle. Unquestionably, you might write research without preparation, but the absence of experience and confidence would strike your energy and deprive of a desire to write it.
🧠 Hence, get attached to notes, ChatGPT or Gemini (creative assistent), and numerous hours of hard work.

3️⃣ Last but not least, keep in-touch with dictionaries, because they provide right definitions of words you use while investigating and expressing hypotheses. Noone knows that the improper usage of collocations or terms is hardly ever inconsiderable. For instance, you cannot say "The person resisted catastrophic pressure.", as long as the highlighted word means disastrous consequences.

⚡ THE RESEARCH TRICK MOST STUDENTS HAVE NEVER HEARD OF
It is called citation chaining - life changing research method
#useful

When you find one genuinely useful paper, don't just read it and move on. Do two things:
1️⃣scroll to the reference list at the end. Every source that paper cited is a potentially relevant paper you haven't found yet. Go find those. Then check their references too. You can map an entire field starting from a single paper.

2️⃣go to Google Scholar, find your paper, and click "Cited by." This shows every paper published after it that referenced it. That's how you find the most recent research building on older foundational work.

❓ Why this beats a regular keyword search:
A basic search only shows what an algorithm thinks is relevant. Citation chaining shows what actual researchers in the field considered important enough to reference. Completely different quality of results.

⚙️ Want to see this visually? Try Connected Papers (connectedpapers.com)
📍Paste any paper and see its entire citation network as an interactive map.

The research topic: One of the paramount rules. ✉️

To come up with the greatest topic of yours, always mention these 3 components in your research topic to formulate it more relevant in terms of the present world.

🧿 Artificial Intelligence
Nowadays it is thought AI and its concept are prominent everywhere. Individuals ask about AI, be taught how to manipulate it, and learn its structure. Therefore, a spectrum of investigations is written about effects of AI on numerous fields. Thus, if your research topic interact with how AI works or conceptually reflects, its necessity exponentially grows.
🧿 Robotics
You mustn’t make researches about this science straightforward, besides correlating it with your research area. For instance, if you are writing about literature all of a sudden, include a robotized technology that’d resolve the problem.
🧿 Topic Impression
When your research topic is too common and has no association which would awaken the potential readers, then it is dull. In contrast, if it highlights something significant and deep, but emerges audience's afterthoughts, it is rather plausible to be prevalent, because this kind of the titled messages presents a space for visual interconnection ("Enlisting the Power of Youth for Climate Change" by A. Bandura delineates the role and functions of Youth to address the climate issue).

#additional

Conducting Research: Why is it dull? #additional

It is mistakenly perceived writing your own research work would be effortless and thought-provoking if you had already chosen an interesting topic and a relevant field to go around. However, there is the excruciating truth: unhappily, even the experienced researchers might fail in locking in and finding the impression about their hobby enthusiastic. It mostly happens, because researches demand:
🎱 Being meticulous and stable about the text you are writing;
🎱 Unstoppably thinking about complex things and keeping in-touch;
🎱 Hardly losing attention.

On the other hand, the promoted issue practically exasperates the solely beginners as long as the professional individuals who experienced writing the researcn at least once would understand how to deal with the presented emotions. To overcome your concentration problems and improve the stable fulfillment, consider:
🤩 Sleeping and eating well;
🤩 Making your workspace cozy and clear to prevent any visual distractions;
🤩 Creating a strong discipline and schedule which would provide a full engagement into the managed cycle.

Never forget about the solely fact — research conduction is not hobby itself; it is the whole and memorable project. 🖤

💡ХОЧЕШЬ ПРОВЕСТИ ЛЕТО, ОКУНУВШИСЬ В RESEARCH? 💡

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📊 THE 5 STATS CONCEPTS EVERY STUDENT RESEARCHER ACTUALLY NEEDS
#useful

1️⃣Mean, Median, Mode
When data has extreme outliers like income or housing prices, the median tells a more honest story than the mean. Always ask which one actually represents your data best rather than defaulting to mean automatically.

2️⃣Sample Size
Too small and your results can't be trusted — you can't draw conclusions from 8 people. For survey-based student research, aim for at least 30 responses as an absolute minimum. 100 or more gives your findings real credibility.

3️⃣ Correlation
Measures how strongly two variables move together. Ranges from -1 to +1. Strong positive, strong negative, or no relationship. The most important thing to remember: correlation never proves causation. Two things happening together doesn't mean one caused the other.

4️⃣ P-value
Tells you whether your results are statistically significant or just random chance. Below 0.05 is the standard threshold — meaning less than a 5% probability your results happened by coincidence. You don't need to calculate this by hand — tools like Google Sheets, JASP, or Jamovi do it instantly.

5️⃣ Standard Deviation
How spread out your data is. A low standard deviation means most responses clustered close to the average. A high one means responses were all over the place. Neither is automatically good or bad — it depends entirely on what you're studying.

🆓 Free tools: JASP (jasp-stats.org) and Jamovi (jamovi.org) — both free, both beginner-friendly, both used by actual researchers.

POPULAR METHODS IN RESEARCHES.

Here are the most common methodologies in investigations and scientific works which might introduce you with the entire world of experiments and statictics!

🌞 Quantitative research:
🔤Quantitative research focuses on numbers, measurement, and statistical analysis. It is used when you want to test a hypothesis, compare groups, or measure how strongly variables are related. Common data collection tools include surveys with fixed response options, experiments, standardized tests, and existing datasets.

🌞 Qualitative research:
🔤Qualitative research focuses on meanings, experiences, and context rather than numbers. It is used to understand how people think, feel, and interpret events, behaviors, or social situations. Common methods include interviews, focus groups, observations, document analysis, and oral histories.

🤩 Experimental research:
🔤Experimental research is designed to test cause and effect. The researcher changes one variable, keeps other conditions controlled as much as possible, and then observes whether the change affects another variable. This method is common in psychology, medicine, natural sciences, and education.

#important

Все успели зарегистрироваться? 🧋

🔥 LET'S DEBATE: No Right Answer,Only Good Arguments
We have real research questions. Think it through and share your perspective, backed by valid reasoning.

Today’s question:

"Should AI be allowed to co-author scientific research papers?"

Some context worth considering: AI tools are already being used to analyze data, generate hypotheses, write literature reviews, and draft sections of papers.
Several major journals have banned AI authorship entirely. Others argue that if AI contributed meaningfully to the work, excluding it from authorship is intellectually dishonest. If a paper with AI co-authorship later turns out to contain errors - who exactly is accountable? -
Some say this will democratize science and help researchers in under-resourced settings. Others say it will flood journals with low-quality work.

💬 Whats your claim? Make your in the comments ⬇️

Respectful disagreement only ‼️