AI Research Assistant for Students

How it works

From research topic to complete outline in four steps.

Enter the topic, grade level, and assignment requirements

The teacher enters the research topic, picks the subject and the level, and can add a research question; the form does not ask for page counts or source requirements. The AI uses all of this context to generate a research plan calibrated to the topic and academic level of the assignment. A high school paper gets a different plan than an undergraduate thesis.

AI generates a structured research plan with sub-questions

The research plan breaks the topic into three to five sub-questions, the specific questions the student must answer in order to address the main research question. For a topic like "the environmental impact of fast fashion," sub-questions might include: What is the water usage of textile production? What happens to unsold clothing? How do supply chain distances contribute to emissions? Each sub-question can map to a section of the final paper.

Search terms, where to look, and notes

The AI recommends the types of sources most likely to answer the sub-questions (academic journals, government reports, industry data, news articles, primary documents), and generates search terms to try in Google Scholar, JSTOR, or PubMed. The sheet also says how to take notes: for each source, write the main point, a short quote and the full citation.

The plan ends with an outline

There is no thesis reviewer in the form. You read a working thesis for focus, argumentability, and specificity, and the student revises it if it is too broad or too vague. The AI also generates a paper outline based on the research question and sub-questions, with section headers, and you can add the type of evidence needed in each section and transition suggestions.

The blank page problem

Research papers are the assignment that most students procrastinate on most severely. The reason is not laziness, it is that starting a research paper requires three hard decisions simultaneously: narrowing the topic, identifying relevant sources, and forming a preliminary argument. Students who have not been explicitly taught a research process can stall at the start for hours or days. The AI Research Assistant gives those first decisions a structure.

A structured research workflow can help students organize their work and feel less stuck.

What the research assistant includes

A plan for going from topic to first draft, without doing the research for students.

Smaller questions

Research papers fail most often because the student did not break the topic into manageable sub-questions before starting. The AI generates three to five focused sub-questions that collectively cover the topic and can map to paper sections. Each sub-question should be specific enough to answer with evidence, "Does fast fashion contribute to water pollution?" is answerable; "What is wrong with fast fashion?" is not.

Academic database search terms

Students searching for academic sources often use the same search terms they would use on Google (which produces general results rather than peer-reviewed research. The sheet has search term slots, including the terms experts use; you can teach Boolean search strings for Google Scholar, JSTOR, PubMed, and ERIC) using quotation marks, AND/OR operators, and field-specific MeSH terms or controlled vocabulary where appropriate. One good search term can find the three sources that make a paper.

A strong thesis is arguable (a reasonable person could disagree), specific (it makes a precise claim), and focused (it covers only what the paper will actually address).

Note-taking guide

The sheet says how to take notes for each source: the main point, a short quote and the full citation; you can turn that into a table with columns for the sub-question, page number or URL. A structured note-taking system helps students see gaps in their evidence before they begin drafting, not halfway through.

A short outline

The plan gives a short outline: introduction, what is known, what you found, what it means, and your sources; you can add sections per sub-question, evidence types, word counts, a counterargument section, and a conclusion. Writing from a detailed outline can support first drafts with fewer structural revisions. The outline is plain text that you can edit in your own document as research progresses.

Where to look

Not all sub-questions require the same type of source. A sub-question about historical context needs primary documents and historical analyses. A sub-question about current policy needs recent government reports and news analysis. A sub-question about scientific claims needs peer-reviewed journal articles. The sheet lists library databases, textbooks, and government and university sites; you pick the source type for each sub-question and the databases to search first.

Who uses the research assistant

High school teachers whose students are writing their first research papers can use the plan to show what a research paper actually requires. Many students in 9th and 10th grade have never been taught a research process, they have been assigned research papers, but not taught how to do research. The structured plan gives them a workflow they can follow for every paper going forward.

IB Extended Essay supervisors can use the plan at the start of the two-year process to help students develop a research question that is focused and arguable. The IB examiner criteria for the research question are specific, so check the question against them and build the rest of the plan around it.

Undergraduate instructors can use the plan for seminar papers and capstone projects. At the undergraduate level, the quality of the research question can make a real difference to a paper.

Research teachers and librarians can use the plan as a classroom demonstration at the start of a research unit to show students what a structured research plan looks like before they write their own. The AI output becomes a model that students analyze and adapt.