Research Questions For Literature Reviews: Why A Literature Review?
Research Questions For Literature Reviews: Why A Literature Review?
Research Questions For Literature Reviews: Why A Literature Review?
Naming a topic does not provide a basis for research. You undertake research to find out something
about a topic. What are you trying to find out about the topic? You may notice, for example, that
playground bullying (a topic) has become a problem at your elementary school. You want to solve the
problem (or at least lessen the number and severity of incidents), but first you need to know what factors
affect the number and severity of bullying incidents on elementary school playgrounds? There is your
research question. Notice that the question is fairly general; it does not ask what factors affect bullying on
your school's playground. No such research exists. You will have to build your local solution (and then
test it with action research) by analyzing research of others and then asking how it might apply to your
situation. That analysis and application will be your literature review.
Your literature review will be useful and manageable only if you have a real question. Do not start out
with an opinion. Do not start out with a question you think you already have an answer to. Suppose you
have already decided to petition your school's principal for additional staff for additional staff to monitor
the playground because you are convinced that bullying flourishes if adult supervision is lacking. If you
have already objectively verified this claim, why are you undertaking the research again? If you start
your research already convinced, you are likely to (a) learn nothing useful, (b) lean towards only that
research that supports your untested opinion, (c) bore yourself silly.
If you start your literature review with a thesis (opinion statement), you walk right into a dead end. The
thesis is the answer you are seeking, the purpose for the literature review, the conclusion you will come to
at the end. Bullying most frequently results from physical and psychological abuse at home and requires
family counseling to correct. That is a thesis. How did you arrive at it? By drawing a conclusion from the
research. This is not a chicken-or-egg issue. The question comes before the conclusion. If you want a
thesis statement at the beginning of your paper, retype your conclusion there, right after stating the
research question. But you'll spoil the excitement for readers.
You could narrow the topic by saying what the terms means to you or what you are relating it to: for
example, teacher control and discipline? Synchronized, individualized learning tasks? Cooperative social
environment? Student participation? Teacher training? You could also limit the topic by grade level,
specialty populations, type of school, and so on. You could do a historical study of how the concept of
classroom management has changed over the decades. What you cannot do is try to cover all aspects of
classroom management in a single literature review. You will end up with a superficial treatment of the
topic that contributes nothing to the professional literature.
You could ask a closed question like this: Does student participation in rule-making result in positive
group behavior in elementary classrooms? Your research would be limited to studies that attempted to
find a "yes" or "no" answer to this question or one similar to it.
You could ask an open question like this: How can student participation in rule-making be employed to
improve student group behavior in elementary classrooms? Your research would expand to include
research on various strategies of student participation in rule-making.
You could combine the two questions to ask if-yes-then-how. Be aware that you may not find an exact
match between research studies and your question. It is your job as a scholar to find the research that
most closely addresses the question and then explain to readers how it does.
One better way to ask a sex education question is this: Can public middle school sex education
classes significantly reduce student pregnancy rates? This is a better question because it is limited
(public middle school, "good" = significant reductions in student pregnancy rates). Although this is a
yes/no question, you are likely to uncover a pattern of successful sex education —in other words,
what kind of instruction resulted in the greatest reductions. In that case you’ll have a rich field to
harvest for your discussion and conclusion sections of the lit review.
How do teachers and students benefit from teacher in-service training? That's two questions
requiring two literature reviews.
How can schools get parents involved in their children's education? The question contains a strong
assumption: that children would benefit from their parents' getting involved. Once you have clarified
the meaning of "involved in their children's education," you must make sure that the benefits of such
involvement have been supported by research, and that the drawbacks of such involvement do not
overshadow the benefits. If your assumption is faulty, you've lost your readers at the first paragraph.
Check your assumptions before you decide on the question. The validity of the assumption need not
be established in the paper, but most readers will know if it is faulty or weak.
Sources Consulted
rd
Badke, W. B. (2008). Research strategies: Finding your way through the information fog (3 ed.). Lincoln, NE:
iUniverse.
th
Fraenkel, J. R. & Wallen, N. E. (2006), How to design and evaluate research in education (6 ed.). Boston, MA:
McGraw Hill.
Hart, C. (2001). Doing a literature search: A comprehensive guide for the social sciences. Thousand Oaks. CA:
Sage.
Kennedy, M. (2005). What makes a research question answerable? Retrieved from Michigan State University
Doctoral Program in Teacher Education Web site: http://ed-
web3.educ.msu.edu/digitaladvisor/Research/whatanswerable.htm
Resources
rd
Badke, W. B. (2008). Research strategies: Finding your way through the information fog (3 ed.). Lincoln, NE:
iUniverse.
Available from the Twin Cities Campus Library, this is the best student-centered book I've seen.
It is loaded with tips, resources, and examples of both bad and good research questions. Best of
all, the author is funny.
Do good athletes make good students and good citizens? You can do the analysis of this one. Will it fly
as a research question? Why or why not?