Research Proposal

Title: Survey of Wikipedia usage by Undergraduate college students.

Problem Statement:

While Wikipedia has been a driving force in mass collaboration, its contents have

been very questionable. There has been controversy in the value of Wikipedia and it’s

content and knowledge.

With this said this paper will serve as a way to find if students use Wikipedia for

academics, if they know what Wikipedia is, and if their teachers approve it

Literature Review

I will be following the following steps for the literature review:

1. Define your topic: you must define your topic and components of your topic

2. Search for materials: use search tools (such as the library catalogue, databases,

bibliographies) to find materials about your topic

3. Evaluate what you have found: read and evaluate what you have found in order

to determine which material makes a significant contribution to the understanding

of the topic

4. Analysis and interpretation: provide a discussion of the findings and

conclusions of the pertinent literature

Data Collection

My data will collected by the quantitative and qualitative method. The first set of data

(quantitative) will be collected from 10 undergraduate students at San Jose State

University. First, I will give the 10 study participants a questionnaire with asking the

following questions:
 1. Is Wikipedia your first choice when doing research on the Internet?

2. Is Wikipedia equivalent to the encyclopedia?

3. Do any of your teachers object to the usage of Wikipedia?

4. Do you view Wikipedia as a scholarly reference site?

The second phase of the data collection(qualitative) will be through research from 10

articles from various educational databases, online articles, and educational websites.

Design of the study

The study will be partly using the descriptive research design, which is one of the two

types of quantitative method as some of the information will be coming from surveys

from 10 students at San Jose State University. The descriptive study will be a case as it

will only report data on one subject which is Wikipedia and it’s usage among college

students.

References

Cresswell, J (2008) . Educational Research. Upper Saddle River New Jersey: Pearson.

Concordia University Libraries