1. What is a student?

2 Understanding the Question, including PICO and SPICE - Deconstructing the task - Knowing your audience - Practice based questions, PICO and SPICE - Problem solving - Writing a research proposal - Peer assessment

3 Organising your Time

4 Gathering Information, includes research design and ethics

5 Finding Information: keywords and database searching

6 Evaluating Information, includes critical reviewing

7 Managing Information

8 Plagiarism

9 Harvard and APA referencing

10 Numerical, OSCOLA and Chicago referencing

11 Communicating Information, presentation and writing skills

12 Your digital footprint

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Unit 2: Developing a practice-based question

SPICE

If you are studying the social sciences, a more appropriate system may be SPICE:

• SETTING (Where? in what context?)
• POPULATION or PERSPECTIVE (For whom?)
• INTERVENTION (What?)
• COMPARISON (What else?)
• EVALUATION (how well? What result?)

Here is an example of how it works:

Setting	Scotland
Population or Perspective	Teenagers
Intervention	Provision of Quit Kits to support smoking cessation
Comparison	No support or "cold turkey"
Evaluation	Number of successful attempts to give up smoking with Quit Kits compared to number of successful attempts with no support.

SMILE - Developing a practice based question by Jamie Frankis, Lesley Price, Ima Jackson SHLS and modified by Marion Kelt, Glasgow Caledonian University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.