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Crafting a Question

I'm a few weeks into my second course in my program, this one being Advanced Research Methods. the topic du jour this last week was about crafting research questions. Here are some exercises we've gone through this week.

Using only one-or two-word responses, write down the answers to the following questions:
  • What is your topic?
    • open and networked learning
  • What is the context for your research?
    • Indigenous education
  • What do you want to achieve?
    • discover how Indigenous learners participate in networked and open education
  • What is the nature of your question?
    • how and why
  • Are there any potential relationships you want to explore?
    • how does the platform influence what students do?
      Starting with the nature of the question, i.e. who, what where how when, begin to piece together the answers generated in step 1 until you feel comfortable with the eventual question or questions.

      Possible Question a)

  • how do Indigenous students participate in open and networked learning Possible Question b)
  • Which learning designs maximize learning for Indigenous students in open and networked learning environments? Possible Question c)
    1. If you have developed more than one question, decide on your main question based on interest and practicalities.
    2. Narrow and clarify until your question is as concise and well articulated as possible.

Evaluating Research Questions

We've been provided with two different heuristics for evaluating research questions, FINER, and TEACUP, along with 10 questions to evaluate, as follows:

  1. What is the relationship between days absent and achievement?
  2. Are charter schools good for education?
  3. How do outcomes for online courses compare to those for traditional courses?
  4. Should moral or character education be taught in school?
  5. Is bilingual education effective?
  6. What is the best way to teach reading?
  7. Should all children in public school wear uniforms?
  8. How do university entrance exams influence high school curriculum?
  9. Will teaching strategies based on students’ learning styles result in stronger motivation and higher achievement?
  10. Is the homeschooling movement good for Canadian education?

FINER

  • Feasible
    • Adequate number of subjects
    • Adequate technical expertise
    • Affordable in time and money
    • Manageable in scope
  • Interesting
    • Interesting to the investigator
  • Novel
    • Confirms, refutes, or extends previous findings
    • Provides new findings
  • Ethical
  • Relevant
    • To scientific knowledge
    • To future research directions

From Campbell, J. D. (n.d.) Formulating the research question. Retrieved from http://www.atsu.edu/research/pdfs/campbell_syllabus.pdf

TEACUP

  • Tolerable (not too threatening)
  • Ethical
  • Answerable
  • Clear
  • Unbiased
  • Penetrating

From Nussbaum, S. (2012). The TEACUP Olympics. In B. P. Skott & M. Ward (Eds.), Active learning exercises for research methods in social sciences (pp. 71-76). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

My assessment of the questions.

Question F I N E R Total
1 0* 3 2 5 4 14
2 0 4 3 5 5 17
3 0 1 3 5 2 11
4 0 4 4 5 5 18
5 0 3 3 5 4 15
6 0 5 4 5 5 19
7 0 2 2 3 1 8
8 0 5 3 4 5 17
9 0 1 2 2 1 6
10 2 3 4 5 5 19

/* indicates that this cannot be assessed based on the information provided.

Question T E A C U P Total
1 4 4 2 2 3 2 17
2 3 4 2 2 3 3 17
3 4 4 1 2 4 2 17
4 2 3 3 3 3 4 18
5 5 5 2 2 5 3 21
6 5 5 3 2 4 3 22
7 2 3 1 2 2 1 11
8 4 4 4 3 4 5 24
9 2 2 3 1 2 1 10
10 4 4 2 2 3 3 18

There is an opportunity here to re-write these to get higher scores, but I'm not going to.

Seems that both Q7 and Q9 didn't score very well on either scale for me. There is perhaps some bias at play as I don't think that school uniforms or teaching to 'learning styles' (which one of the 70 or so styles, I don't know) is a worthwhile endeavour.

Interesting that the FINER scale was biased much lower than the TEACUP scale because of the inability to evaluate the feasibility of studies from the questions given.