An independent research project means choosing a question that genuinely interests you and pursuing it like a scholar — reading widely, weighing evidence, and producing something of your own. It's the single best way to deepen your learning, and the thing that most makes a university application stand out.
The five steps
- Find a question. Start from something that genuinely puzzles or excites you, then narrow it until it's small enough to actually answer. "Space" is a topic; "Why hasn't a crewed mission to Mars happened yet?" is a question.
- Explore what's known. Read around it widely. Who has tried to answer this? Where do experts disagree? Keep a running list of every source, with notes on what each adds.
- Plan. Decide your method, your final form, and milestones with dates. Ask: what would a convincing answer actually need to contain?
- Create or investigate. Do the work — the experiment, the analysis, the writing, the making. Expect your question to sharpen as you go.
- Share & reflect. Present your findings, and reflect honestly: what worked, what you'd change, and what you still don't know. The unanswered questions are often the most interesting part.
What makes a good question?
A strong research question is focused, open (it can be argued, not just looked up), researchable with what you can reach, and genuinely interesting to you. Watch a weak question improve as you tighten it:
A worked example
Suppose you land on that last question. A scholar's plan might look like:
- Read first: two or three serious sources that disagree (a psychologist who sees harm; one who sees moral panic).
- Notice the trap: most studies show correlation — do anxious teenagers use more social media, or does social media make them anxious? (this is the correlation-versus-cause trap — easy to get backwards.)
- Decide your method: you can't run a clinical trial, but you can review and compare existing studies, and perhaps run a careful, anonymous survey of your year group.
- Produce: a 2,000-word review that weighs the evidence and reaches a careful, hedged conclusion — not "social media is evil", but "the strongest evidence suggests…".
Finding & judging sources
Where to look — beyond the first page of a search engine: Google Scholar for academic papers, books and reviews, expert talks and lectures, and the references at the end of a good article (follow them backwards).
How to judge a source, quickly:
- Who wrote it, and what's their expertise or interest?
- Evidence — does it show its working, or just assert?
- When — is it current enough for your question?
- Why — is it trying to inform you, sell you something, or persuade you?
Reference as you go. Keep author, title, date and link for everything — it's miserable to reconstruct later, and it's what makes work trustworthy.
Starter questions by subject
Sciences
- Why have some antibiotics stopped working, and what's being done about it?
- Could lab-grown meat realistically replace farming — and should it?
Mathematics & Computing
- How do recommendation algorithms decide what you see, and what are the side effects?
- Where does the mathematics of cryptography keep your messages secret?
Humanities & Social Sciences
- What makes a protest movement succeed? Compare two from history.
- How does the way a country teaches its own history shape national identity?
English & the Arts
- How has one author's reputation changed over a century, and why?
- What makes a piece of music feel "sad"? Investigate across cultures.
Economics & Business
- Why do almost-identical houses sell for wildly different prices streets apart?
- Does raising the minimum wage cost jobs? What does the evidence actually show?
Psychology
- Why do eyewitnesses so often remember things wrongly — and what does that mean for justice?
- Can willpower be trained, or is it a fixed resource?
Producing your project
Match the form to the question: an extended essay or dissertation, a scientific investigation and report, a piece of original creative work with commentary, a documentary or presentation, or a designed artefact. The thinking matters far more than the format.
Avoid these pitfalls
- Too broad. If you could write a library about it, narrow it.
- One source. If your whole project leans on a single website, it isn't research yet.
- Describing, not arguing. Aim to answer a question, not just summarise a topic.
- Leaving it late. Good projects are built in steps over weeks, not in a weekend.
Where next
- Ask your teachers about the Extended Project Qualification (EPQ) — a formal way to gain a qualification for exactly this kind of work in Post 16.
- FutureLearn — free short university courses to build background knowledge.
- Gresham College — 400 years of free public lectures to spark a question.
Produce & share
Make something: Send Mr King a one-paragraph proposal — your research question, why it interests you, and a rough plan of how you'd answer it. He can help you sharpen it and find a mentor before you begin.
What you'll practise
Independent enquiry, research and referencing, planning and persistence, judging evidence, and communicating your own ideas — the core habits of university study.