Frame Your Question - Activity

Introduction | Presentation | Activity

Reflect on your research (10 minutes)

Use the prompts below to reflect on your research topic(s).

What aspect of your research interests you? Why do you care about it?
What concepts do you want to engage with in your research?
What are some keywords that you would use to describe your topic, or to search for relevant sources?
What insights do you want to reveal in your field?
What are challenges that you have encountered or expect to encounter in your research?
The way I would write my research question at this moment is…

Pitch your question (10 minutes)

Using your responses from the exercise above, create an elevator pitch for one of the following audiences:

University administrator whose expertise is in a different discipline
Bookstore’s events coordinator
School group of 4th graders
Editors of a journal to whom you want to propose a special issue
First paragraph of an op-ed

Analyze a research proposal (15 minutes)

Consider how well you can answer the following questions from the first paragraph of a sample fellowship proposal.

What is the central research question?
What is the central research claim?
What kinds of sources does the author plan to use? How will these sources support their claim and/or answer the question?

My research goal is to understand rural poverty’s effects on minority student achievement using a Native American reservation home to two tribes in Northern California as my case study. While urban poverty has attracted much scholarly attention, rural poverty remains under-studied. Drawing on the urban poverty literature, specifically the effect of neighborhood context on minority children’s outcomes, I propose to adapt and extend this framework to reflect the experiences of rural Native communities. My central argument is that, as in urban communities, the concentration of poverty and other negative social forces will have profound negative effects on students’ outcomes. Adaptation is necessary, however, because rural areas are home to poor Native minorities, and are marked by more extreme spatial isolation & unemployment. Specifically, in the case of Native American reservations, preliminary findings show that these areas are geographically remote and have unemployment rates over 80%, and that living within the physical boundaries of a reservation further handicaps individuals in the labor market. I hypothesize that this concentration of disadvantage negatively impacts student performance in different ways than in the urban example. I view this adaptation of neighborhood effects theory to rural reservation poverty as a new aspect of the field.

Excerpted from a longer sample in Scholarly Pursuits: A Guide to Professional Development during the Graduate Years, 15th edition (Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2021) Links to an external site., page 93.

Reflect on your thoughts (5 minutes)

Think back to the first part of this activity.

What reflection questions were easy to answer?

What aspects of your project are harder to match to this framework?

Consider whether these aspects need more investigation.
Is there anywhere you might need a different framework or approach?

Keep talking

The more you talk about your research topic, the sharper your question will become.

Find friends and colleagues to discuss your research with. Use the prompts and frameworks from this module to ask for feedback. Ask if they are willing to share their draft questions and proposals with you.

You have completed Frame Your Question. Explore more modules.