This past semester I did a research project for my Anthropology of Education course focusing on Universal Design in the classroom. When doing my research I noticed that my question had shifted given my observations in the classroom I was studying. My research question changed from what originally was “What is Universal Design in the classroom?” To “How Does Physical Presence of the professor and classroom set up promote the universal design of learning?”. When writing my final paper, I struggled with finding articles with what I had been studying in the class I was observing for that semester; however, I managed to find similarities in the scholarly text that related to my observations and a general understanding of Universal Design as a whole. I found that the easiest way for me to find scholarly sources was by using Google Scholar, where I would type in “Universal Design in a classroom desk set up”. When searching specific questions that were related to this topic I noticed that briefly mentioning what I was trying to get across in the search rather than typing in the entire research question gave me more interesting and similar information to what I had been observing in the class I was studying. However, a lot of the articles began to feel repetitive, and also the majority of them focused on elementary Universal Design setup or High school which was not my focus considering I was studying in a college classroom. That being said, I struggled with finding information about College classrooms involving Universal Design and had to search multiple different tedious things in order to access the research I needed to back up my question. I believe that I had a good amount of evidence; however, I think that I could have had better information supporting my research and or thesis question. Looking back I would have changed my research question or tweaked it even further. I also think that If I had known that I would have trouble with finding my sources that related to the classroom I was observing I would have searched to find resources at the very beginning of my project instead of after the fact and having to dig to discover sources when writing my 8-10 page paper.
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