Six Steps of Investigation
Learn how to investigate real-world issues in your community. Master the six essential steps from picking a topic and interviewing people to analyzing your results and sharing your discoveries.
Like Duolingo, but for Six Steps of Investigation. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
A short one: 8 levels across 2 sections, about 16 minutes end to end, roughly 3 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Gathering Voices and Making Sense and Speaking Up. It starts from scratch.
Free forever · No credit card · iPhone & Android
Key ideas in Six Steps of Investigation
- A Global Perspectives topic must impact a shared group or community rather than personal taste
- Personal preferences like favorite foods or games do not provide an issue to investigate or solve
- Community issues involve shared challenges, rules, or resources
- Global issues are too huge to collect primary evidence for directly as a student
- Narrowing to a school or local area allows a student to survey people or make direct observations
- A local investigation reflects the broader global pattern on a manageable scale
- Open questions starting with 'why' or 'how' help researchers uncover reasons, opinions, and motivations
- Closed questions give quick counts or binary facts like yes/no
- Good investigations use open questions to explore perspectives and closed questions to quantify habits
- Testable student questions must focus on what people around you actually know and experience
- Asking school peers or neighbors about distant political plans produces guesses rather than reliable evidence
- Complicated words or vague phrasing make people interpret survey questions differently
- Offering clear, fixed choices helps everyone answer using the exact same standard
- Long surveys cause survey fatigue, leading participants to rush or leave questions blank
- Keeping surveys brief and focused ensures participants finish every question
- Active listening requires giving the participant time to share their complete thought
You've tried the other tabs
Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.
You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.
One answer, then back to scrolling.
Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.
Tomo gives Six Steps of Investigation the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.
Here's what playing it feels like
A real question from this course. Take your best guess.
Which of these is a personal preference rather than an issue to investigate?
Get it right to open this lesson and 7 more in the app.
Where Six Steps of Investigation takes you
- 1
Gathering Voices
- Picking an Issue and Asking Good Questions
- Collecting Views with Surveys and Interviews
- 2
Making Sense and Speaking Up
- Organizing Evidence and Sharing Your Story
2 sections · 3 units · 8 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
You pick the voice
Six Steps of Investigation is taught in the The Professor style: clear, structured, thorough. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.
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Start Six Steps of Investigation today.
Download Tomo, search Six Steps of Investigation, and play your first lesson in under a minute.