Something that I've noticed from working with first year writing and rhetoric classes is that research questions are conceptually something that people want more clarity on, but they don't really know how to ask that question. The instructor I worked with this summer explicitly said he wanted me to cover research questions in my last session in class. While he didn't give too many specifics, just that he wanted me to cover research questions, based on experience in reference/research consultations the issue of "what is a good research question?" was one I knew I wanted to cover.
I designed this activity to go after I had talked about the elements of a good research question and had modeled strengthening two mediocre examples. For an in person session, I probably would have used a paper handout (especially as this is modeled after a colleague's activity), but this lent itself really well to the online setting. I got four students to identify which of the three options for each example they thought would be the best version of a research question investigating the prompt topic. I was gratified to see that for our third session together they needed very little prompting to talk through their thought process as they evaluated the questions. What Worked: The number of examples worked well. I had initially planned for there to be five, but I couldn't come up with a fifth relevant example topic so it ended up being four. That worked out though; I feel like it was enough repetition to drive the point home but not so much that it got tedious. The Google Form also worked well for this one; I didn't run into the scrolling up and down issue that I had with previous activities for this class. I made the form a "quiz" so that students looking at the form asynchronously could get feedback on their choices which worked well for this activity because I envisioned there being a right answer (unlike the sources deck building game). What Didn't: Initially getting people to jump in was a little tough because while screensharing I couldn't see the chat or people raising hands, but that's more an issue with screensharing in Teams than anything else. What I'd Change: Honestly this worked exactly as I expected it to which was refreshing. Obviously I would tailor the examples to different first year writing and rhetoric class themes if I were to reuse the tool, but I would do that with any tool. It's great when things go exactly according to plan.
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