RESEARCH PROBLEMS AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS
A Research Problem
All research studies are motivated by a focus on a particular issue or concern, usually one which is of interest to you as a teacher, or to your school. It might be a particular challenge that you face in your classroom, such as the reluctance of some girls to engage in sport; or it might be an idea that you are interested in, such as different ways to provide effective assessment feedback. It could be informed by national publicity about an issue, such as the educational achievement of socially disadvantaged children, or by your knowledge of other research that has been conducted in this area, such as studies which show that developing self-regulation improves student learning outcomes. But crucially, the research problem is your reason for engaging in this research.
It is a good idea to express your research problem in writing at an early stage: writing is an excellent way of clarifying your own thinking. In describing your research problem you might explain your interest in this problem, how it relates or is manifest in your own professional practice, and why it matters to investigate this.
Innovations and Interventions
Because the Innovation Schools project focuses on innovation, what you will be doing is to design some form of innovation which will address your identified research problem. For example, if your problem is that links between literacy in English and literacy in PE seem weak and so students are not drawing on their learning from English when reading and writing in PE, an innovation might be for English and PE teachers to co-plan some PE lessons which involve literacy. In order to consider whether this innovation is effective, you would have to create an intervention that will allow you to explore its effectiveness. So for example, you might take one unit of study for GCSE PE and co-plan the literacy elements, then implement the planned teaching and evaluate its effect on students’ literacy in that unit’s work.
From Research Problem to Research Question
The research problem establishes the purpose and context for your research, but in order to conduct a meaningful and rigorous piece of research, you need to devise more specific and focused research questions. The research questions set out the exact territory you wish to investigate. A common problem with research questions is that they are too broad and unfocused. For example, a question such as ‘Why don’t boys achieve as well as girls?’ is a huge question, and not really possible to investigate in one research study (unless it is massively well-funded with a large team of researchers!). So you need to think very precisely about your research questions.
With the Innovation Schools project your research question will come from your chosen innovation in other words you will be asking how effective your chosen intervention is in addressing your identified problem. This is why it is important to be able to state your research problem clearly, and the innovation you intend to introduce. Your main research question will therefore use the words of your problem and of your innovation: so to take our literacy example:
Research Problem: links between literacy in English and literacy in PE seem weak
Innovation: English and PE teachers co-plan literacy in PE to make links between English and PE visible
Intervention: English and PE teachers co-plan literacy lessons, making English-PE links visible, for one unit of GCSE work
Research Question: Does co-planning literacy and making the English-PE links visible for one GCSE unit in PE improve students’ literacy attainment in that unit?
Here you should be able to see the coherent link between the research problem, the innovation, the specific intervention and the research questions.
Having determined your research questions, you might want to devise some sub-questions which relate to the main question, which will allow you to explore your intervention in more detail. Going back to our literacy example,
Main Research Question:
- Does co-planning literacy and making the English-PE links visible for one GCSE unit in PE improve students’ literacy attainment in that unit?
Subsidiary Research Questions:
- Does the intervention work equally for all pupils or does it work better for some lower-attaining students? [could be replaced by gender; EAL; pupil premium or any other pupil grouping]
- What subject knowledge of literacy do PE teachers need to implement this effectively?
- What subject knowledge of PE for English teachers need to co-plan effectively?
- What are students’ perceptions of the helpfulness of this intervention?
The choice of research questions and the clarity of your understanding of your intervention will help you choose an appropriate research design.