Asking Research Questions

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Asking Research Questions

• Sally Fincher
• Building Research in Australasian Computing
  Education Second Workshop
• 26th-29th January 2005 Sydney

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Questions

• Questions do not spring fully-formed
• Undergo iterative refinement
• Questions do not stand alone
• Its not enough to ask
• implied in the asking is the expectation of an
  answer
• you must want to know (evidence)
• you must be able to answer (technique)

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4 Loops

• Clarity
• Evidence
• Technique
• Significance

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4 Loops

• Clarity
• Evidence
• Technique
• Significance

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Loop Clarity

• Specificity - is it vague?
• Language is it understandable to your community
  (jargon, buzzwords)?
• Recognizable as a question is it a sentence?
• Doable can you imagine how you might study it?

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Loop Clarity (i)

• Specificity is it vague?
• What makes a good programmer?
• Language is it understandable to your community
  (jargon, buzzwords)?
• using the CoP framework can we explain the
  learning environment

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Loop Clarity (ii)

• Language is it understandable to your community
  (jargon, buzzwords)?

We are planning a conference in December 2005, to
explore alternative approaches to educational
research. What we mean by 'alternative' is still
rather unclear. Our starting point is a feeling
that there is a bigger variety of practices being
used by researchers and practitioners to
understand learning and teaching than is apparent
in the literature, and that some of these
approaches could be very valuable if they were
more widely known.
I certainly think the conference idea is a good
one. You seem to be mainly thinking about
'alternatives' in terms of empirical
methodologies. But wouldn't it be worth extending
to alternatives in terms of ontological and
epistemological perspectives? Allied to that
would be the methods of conceptual analysis.
What I would appreciate is a translation for
uninitiated people like myself. I tripped up on
"ontological and epistemological perspectives?
Allied to that would be the methods of conceptual
analysis." I think the rest of Leonard's message
rings some useful bells, and I would like to hear
more, but in language I can understand.
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Loop Clarity (iii)

• Recognizable as a question is it a sentence?
• whether handset usage predicts final outcome
• Doable can you imagine how you might study it?
• When teaching students their first course on
  programming should the emphasis be on problem
  solving or on the language
• As programmers mature from novice to expert, do
  the pass through stages, where they read and
  reason about code in different ways? If so, in
  what ways do the reasoning strategies differ?

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4 Loops

• Clarity
• Evidence
• Technique
• Significance

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Loop Evidence

• Empirical investigation
• What makes you believe your claims?
• What would you need to convince a colleague in
  AND out of the choir?
• What would a sufficient answer look like?
• What would an unsatisfactory claim look like?
• What might contradictory examples look like?

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Loop Evidence (i)

• Empirical investigation
• What makes you believe your claims?
• What would you need to convince a colleague in
  AND out of the choir?
• Is success in team-based work related to
  students epistemological beliefs (EB)?
• given the approach is phenomenography it's
  interview transcripts talking for about an hour
  with developers

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Loop Evidence (ii)

• What would a sufficient answer look like?
• What would an unsatisfactory claim look like?
• What might contradictory examples look like?
• What kinds of learning and learning contexts is
  peer assessment suited to?
• Can explicit problem solving skill instruction
  be incorporated into a programming curriculum at
  the cost of time from practical or other explicit
  instruction?

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4 Loops

• Clarity
• Evidence
• Technique
• Significance

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Loop Technique

• What technique(s) might produce the evidence you
  need?
• How do you know?
• Whats involved with using this technique?
• Assessing costs opportunity, time/resources,
  available knowledge
• Do you know how to do it?

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Loop Technique (i)

• What technique(s) might produce the evidence you
  need?
• How do you know?
• I am interested in the way experts and novices
  use 'programming tools' to represent their
  emerging conceptualisations of a programming
  task.
• Whats involved with using this technique?
• Assessing costs opportunity, time/resources,
  available knowledge
• Do you know how to do it?
• phenomenography, CoP analysis etc.

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Loop Technique (ii)

• Whats involved with using this technique?
• Assessing costs opportunity, time/resources,
  available knowledge
• Do novice programmers exposed to explicit
  instruction in problem solving skills produce
  problem solutions Faster With greater
  accuracy and with more consistency (between
  solutions)?

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4 Loops

• Clarity
• Evidence
• Technique
• Significance

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Loop Significance (aka so what?)

• For whom (audience)?
• To you, others?
• For both computing AND education?
• For a disciplinary community
• Relevance - Why might they be interested?
• Justification - What is the contribution?
• Context - How does this fit in the known
  landscape?
• Edgy Does it open up new avenues?

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Questions in context (reprise)

• Pose significant questions that can be
  investigated empirically
• Link research to relevant theory
• Use methods that permit direct investigation
• Provide coherent and explicit chain of reasoning
• Replicate and generalize across studies
• Disclose research to encourage professional
  scrutiny and critique

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Remember

• You can always rely on the basics
• Why am I doing this?
• What am I doing?
• Is this doable?