Week 11

Tuesday, 22 March 2011

                Today’s class is about how to formulate effective research questions. I admit that most of the times, I also do not have the idea on how to write research questions. But thanks to Dr. Izaham, today’s lecture has kind of giving me new knowledge on formulating research questions. I understand that research questions must be based on the purposes and statement of the problem in the study, but the common problem is that I fail to really specify my research questions. I always end up being too general and had to rephrase the questions. Learning and seeing how to formulate research questions in the class today made me felt like it is not so difficult to come out with an effective research question. Doing some examples has given me a shed of light on how to formulate research questions for my proposal. I am interested with 4-column table mentioned by Dr. Izaham to aid and give clearer view of the direction in research questions. The four columns are for research questions, how do you want to collect data, what kind of data you want to collect and how do you want to analyze the data. I will surely utilize this table as I find it very helpful for me to see what am I going to do with each research question investigated.

            In literature review, I have been told since doing my degree that it is not just a summary of all the articles pertaining to the topic investigated. But at that time, I had no idea how am I going to synthesize all those information into an organized review of literature. Now that I am in master’s programme, reviewing articles is not an alien thing for us anymore. We need to read a lot and give critiques to the articles. On the good side of it, it is a practice for us to be familiar with research articles and know how to process and synthesize information gained from the articles. Before this, when I read articles, I would just agree with what the researchers had reported because I felt that they were more knowledgeable than me and knew what they were doing. However, I realize that not all research articles are carried out efficiently and there’s always something I want to ask when I read research articles. Nevertheless, there are many more things that I need to learn to enhance my research skills.