WEEK 21: Deciding on your research question

Research question

A literature review will:

• Provide an overview of the research that has been conducted on blogging and writing
• Describe and summarise the findings of previous research
• Make connections and compare and contrast research findings
• Evaluate and analyse the research findings and organise information into coherent themes.

The literature review will serve both as an individual assignment and as the background research for my teacher inquiry project plan.

Shuttleworth's article (2009), suggests that writing a literature review in chronological order is “usually perceived as being a little lazy”, possibly because rather than making connections and contrasts in the different research papers, the reader has just looked at each paper in turn and reviewed them individually. Doing so does not look deeply at the material and synthesise the findings across the papers in the review. There may be aspects of our review that we could write in chronological order when looking at changes that have occurred over time with blogging? We might also look to structure our review around certain aspects of writing or if we can not find research on this, perhaps look at student agency, engagement and writing improvement, although this could be too broad?

Writing a literature review

The important aspects of literature reviews include: deciding on your research question, locating suitable resources, then critically evaluating and synthesising what they say. This week, I will look at the first part of the process: deciding on my (and our as we plan to do this collaboratively in our syndicate) research question (Figure 1)

Figure 1: The important aspects of a literature review, beginning with deciding on a research question.

1. Decide on your initial research question(s)

Figure 2: Deriving a literature review research question from an initial teacher inquiry question

Some potential questions I have are:

• How will blogging affect writing engagement in my Year 7 & 8 priority learners?
• How might students' use of blogs improve writing skills in my Year 7 & 8 priority learners?
• How might student agency and engagement be affected through blogging?

1.a. Turning your inquiry topic(s) into an initial teacher inquiry question:

• How might students' use of blogs improve writing skills in my Year 7 & 8 priority learners?

Table 3 shows an example of how the template works

Table 3: An example of turning a break-down question into an initial teacher inquiry question teacher inquiry question

1.b. Turning the initial teacher inquiry question into an initial literature review question

How might students' use of blogs improve writing skills?

I have chosen to exclude the ‘priority learners’ in my final question because I think I will be limiting the number literature sources that I can find through such a specific focus, this is reason for having a broader approach to the question.

References

Fraenkel, J. R., Wallen, N. E., & Hyun, H. H. (1993). How to design and evaluate research in education (Vol. 7). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Riel, M. (2014, Feb 18).T6-Beginning the first cycle of action research.[video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwWPwyv60E4

Shuttleworth, M. (2009, Sep 16). What is a Literature Review?. Explorable.com. Retrieved from https://explorable.com/what-is-a-literature-review