Handbook for Doctoral Students in Education/Guiding questions
Guiding questions
[edit | edit source]Once you can answer all questions, you should be ready to defend your dissertation. However, you need to start somewhere!
- What is your area of interest? Why do you care about THAT? Why do YOU care about that?
- What is the practical problem you want to address?
- What is the theoretical problem you want to address? In other words, what knowledge we are lacking?
- What is you hunch about a possible theoretical solution?
- What are the two-three key concepts you are planning to use to think about this problem?
- Why do you need each of them? What is each concept’s purpose? How all of them fit with each other, and why do you need all three?
- What do you think is already known about your topic?
- Which fields or subfields, which “schools” or research traditions crated this knowledge? Do you know any big shots?
- What can you add to what people have already found?
- What is your impression of the state of the field(s) with which you’re working?
- What is the title of your dissertation?
- What are your empirical methods? What’s the project?
- What is the hypothesis?
- What is your conceptual framework? Please use narrative, not a picture.
- What is the foundational literature for your topic?
- How do you evaluate the state of foundational literature?
- What are the core research findings you will be using?
- What is new in your project?
- Divide literature in groups in a logical way; explain how these different groups of lit have a job to do in your dissertation.
- Tell a short narrative about the research literature you will be using.