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Basic criteria to evaluate a research question start with:
- grounded in theory.
- What does that mean? It means that your research question is grounded in the existing knowledge we already have on the subject, that you can tie your question back to the existing literature (in the case of the Wumpus World the vast majority of that is in the textbook) on the subject.
- Why does this matter? It matters because each piece of research produces one small piece of information that is like one piece of a jigsaw puzzle. We need to know what to do with that piece. Really those individual contributions are much more like pieces of thread or yarn that we will weave together into a tapestry. We won't know what the whole looks like until we're done. That's why all the writing is so important.
- Subject to empirical investigation.
- What does this mean? It means that, while you may be interested in larger, more fundamental questions, you need to design research questions that you can actually design experiments to yield information about those research questions. That isn't cheating, it's good science. Lots of time, money, energy, etc., is lost by applying incorrect models.
- Why are some questions not subject to empirical investigation? Lots of reasons:
- too vague
- inherently not investigable (hard to create stars in a lab)
- unethical (lots of those in education)
- poorly constructed (applying the medical model - drug testing model - to educational alternatives is a classic case. The reason this doesn't work is that in the drug testing model all the complexities of the participants' lives are well understood in how they interact with the drug testing model, but in education that isn't so. Also, in education, people's lives aren't immediately on the line.)
- and many more
and then there's a third that not everyone agrees with:
- good research questions do not have a yes/no answer. Yes/no answers really belong with hypotheses.
Some of the division about that criterion seems to have to do with your discipline and how common expertise in pattern recognition is in the discipline.
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HilaryHolz - 02 Dec 2008
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