Week 22: Refining Research Question

Further refining research question(s) and literature search

My question:

How might students' use of blogs improve writing skills?

For Assessment 1 - Literature Review, criteria 1 of the rubric, the scope of the topic is to look specifically at research based on primary schools, but I realise I might need to go further afield if there are no papers to cover this.

Points to consider this week when researching articles are:

• Are there clearly stated research questions?
• Does the article explain why the topic is important?
• Is the research design and methodology described? Does it seem appropriate for the area of study?
• What is the data analysis like? Are the results clearly explained?
• What are the conclusions? Are they a reasonable reflection of the data analysis?

What I need to include my review

• Summarise the findings from the publication.
• Highlight the weaknesses and strengths
• Analyse gaps in the research

I have decided not to include ‘Grey literature’ in my literature review, basing my review rather on journal articles from the Unitec Library.

This week I have started collecting material and reviewing it in part for my peers (as we are writing the assignment together). Next week we will get together and look at how we can co-construct the assignment- potentially a challenge- and work collaboratively, to ensure we are sharing our workload and also covering the material we need to write a clear and worthwhile review.