Research skills and exam support

About How to Research

A student showing a teacher their sketchbook

This resource was developed to offer creative research strategies to support a broad range of Art & Design curriculums for GCSE, BTech, and A-Level students.

How to Research models how artists can carry out research, with a specific focus on writing, drawing and looking. We invited three artists to respond to a project brief, providing prompts that encouraged them to draw connections between their particular thinking and approach to research, and their art-making practice.

The contents page of each booklet details this brief, encompassing methods of writing personal responses and collecting images and inspirations to compile research files; your students can discover new ways of approaching these tasks through the artists’ responses. We have also included discussion points and activities throughout the booklets, prompting students to further their research in their own ways.

Research Brief

An open notebook with writing on the left hand page and an ink drawing of a stack of black blocks and a white block and notes. — Donald Rodney's sketchbook (Tate Archive ref: TGA 200321)
Used with permission

This activity invites your class to build research files of their own, gathering and developing their ideas to support their ongoing coursework. The prompts provide a framework that you can adapt in numerous ways, acknowledging your expertise in best supporting your pupils’ needs.

Ask your students to each find the following:

An image of something they already have, that they currently use to made art
An image of their own artwork
An image of an artwork from the Tate collection that inspires them
A quote or textual reference that inspires them

Then, challenge them to respond to the following questions, through writing, annotation, drawing, making, or more.

What connections can they find between the images and texts they’ve chosen?
Explain a process they use to help them process ideas and inspirations.
What question would they ask an artist about their research? Which artist(s) would they ask it to?

Encourage your students to collect all the work they produce through this project in a sketchbook or folder. Where could they go next? How might this research influence their own artmaking?

How Do Artists Research?

How to Research: Drawing as Research — Image from *Drawing as Research*
© Sovay Berriman

Example discussion points and activities

Go for a walk. As you are walking, think of a question or a problem you are trying to resolve in your art and see if you can generate any new answers. Does the physical process of walking stimulate your thought process in the same way it does Berriman’s?

Make a drawing that explores your original question or problem, and any new ideas generated. Think about how you might relate this drawing to any other drawing, or artwork, you have made previously. Use this connection to make a new work, and so on. Record the connection between the works as you go.

By walking to produce ideas, Berriman might be considered to be engaging with a ‘non-art’ process to generate art. Are there any non-art processes that help you think through ideas, and if a non-art process generates ideas for artworks, is it still a non-art process?

Take a photograph of a photograph, either on a screen or a printed picture. What do you see now that you couldn’t see in the original image? What happens if you repeat this process – how does the actual photograph itself (not what it is picturing) start to become visible, and is this interesting to you? How do you identify what is of interest to you?

How quickly do your interests change? Can you map out your changing interests through artworks/artists you have been drawn do? What can you learn from your map about the way that you are currently looking at art and what questions does the map raise for you?

Get a pile of Post-It notes, record cards or just small scraps of paper. On each separate Post-It, card or piece of paper write down one of the ideas that you are currently working with in an essay, an artwork you are making, or just things you are thinking about. These can be quotations, single words that come to mind, questions, names and anything else you can think of. Stick them up on the wall in a way that makes sense to you. What new relations have formed? Leave them up overnight, or for a longer period of time, and then come back and rearrange them. How does this reordering change the meaning of the words? What new relations have formed? Write down new words or ideas that come to mind and add them to the wall.

This can be repeated for a week, a month, a year…

Use your Post-It wall as a starting point for other forms of writing; poems, lists, stories, scripts, descriptions… Now use someone else’s Post-It wall to do the same.

How to Research booklets are also available to pick up at the Schools Desk at Tate Britain and Tate Modern.

To further support your students at exam time see our Exam Help pages for more ideas and inspiration.

Bring Your Class to Tate

School visits to Tate Britain

Artist-led schools workshop at Tate Modern, boy looking into box

Research skills and exam support

About How to Research

Research Brief

How Do Artists Research?

Example discussion points and activities

Drawing As Research

Looking As Research

Writing As Research

Bring Your Class to Tate

School visits to Tate Britain

School visits to Tate Modern

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