I find that as I wade into research (especially at the beginning), I am changing my research questions and focus frequently to better align with what I am discovering. I wonder if this is normal? When I began, I set out to answer the following question:
To me, this question is perfectly reasonable. From my standpoint as an educator, I see students abusing technology every day. They’re either messaging each other on their laptops or watching TikTok on their phones. I see them sitting in groups, isolated, staring at their phones instead of interacting with each other. Wasn’t technology supposed to better connect us?
Through my exploratory research, I think I’ve found a more focused set of research questions to guide the beginning stages of my inquiry:
- How aware are teenagers of their behavior regarding their internet usage?
- How aware are teenagers of predatory internet practices?
- Does internet behavior interfere with productive behaviors like socialization and inquiry?
- To what degree do students want to change behaviors regarding their internet usage?
- What can we do as educators to improve student behavior regarding internet usage?
I have designed these questions with the current literature in mind and am working on creating a questionnaire that measures these attitudes and perspectives. From an organizational perspective, I’m hoping that this questionnaire provides me further insight into this dilemma so that I can continue to refine my questions.
Organization
The first step in my research process was to start a Google Doc and define some research questions to guide my inquiry process.
The second step was to log in to UVic’s library, find some articles, and plug them into Zotaro for annotation.
The third step was to read each article with my research questions in mind, annotate the most important bits, and export those quotes and annotations to my Google Doc.
This three-step research process seemed to be doing the trick but something was not quite optimized. I learned during our group research project for EDCI 570/571 that I had difficulty remembering what each article was about and how I used it; it was just a bunch of names to me. As a full-time teacher, I get scant time to conduct this research: an hour here, and an hour there. This hardly afforded me time to re-read all of my quotations and annotations every time I sat back down just so I could remember why I even read Soror et al (2012).
The solution was a fourth step in my process: writing a short summary of each article that I placed first in my document before my annotations and quotes. This appears a lot like an annotated bibliography but a little less formal. This helped me quickly pick up where I left off without having to read my entire document.
In summation, my current research organization looks like this:
- Create a document to store my research and define some research questions.
- Find some articles and annotate/cite them using Zotaro
- Export my Zotaro findings into my document
- Write a short summary of each article so I can remember what I’m doing
