6a. Analysing the Question

Right. Prayers said, question chosen. What now?

Your mind has already started ticking about the question and perhaps some ideas have started running around in your head in no particular organised fashion. This is not bad, this chaos. One of the things you have to realise with this thinking work your are doing is that your brain is an organism and is organised like an organism not like something designed by Steve Jobs, made in China and sold for an incredible mark-up. You have to coax it into working for you. But it will work for you in unexpected ways and at times that you won't be ready for it and necessarily conscious of what is happening (or even, actually, conscious at all. That's why we say 'sleep on it'.)

But you do need to look more closely at the actual question and ask what it is really about. We all know what a crime it is to not answer the question. So it is good to figure out what the question is actually asking you to do, so that you do that and not some other thing.

Here's the first thing to look for: the verb. What is it asking you to do. And here I'll let you into a little secret. A while ago - 1956 it was a man named Benjamin Bloom thought far too hard about this sort of thing and came up with 'Bloom's taxonomy' of educational goals. That is: he listed a whole bunch of skills that educators like to get students to show they have: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. All of these are important, but the scale increases in complexity from knowledge through to evaluation. And it is the last three of these that educators in the tertiary education are especially interested in assessing.

So, your research essay will most often couched in terms of (if not in the words of) analysis, synthesis and evaluation. These are the skills that you are supposed to be showing. Sure, you will need to know stuff, and understand it. But you need to pay attention to where the question is asking you to attend to one of these higher order skills.

But there's a trap. Sometimes a question doesn't explicitly ask you to do one of these things. Never mind: do them anyway. Shape the question to fit these goals. Be sure that you will be assessed according to how will you did them, whether the question directly asks you to or not. Believe me here.

Take this question for example:

Evaluate the arguments for and against universalism, with special reference to the work of Jurgen Moltmann.

This is pretty straightforward: the verb is evaluate. What does that mean? It means weigh up; give a value to. Make a judgement. How good are the arguments on both sides?

But what about this question:

What is the nature and extent of progress in the Christian life?

Now you can immediately see that there is no verb asking you to do anything at all here. But you still need to ask: what is the question asking me to evaluate/synthesise/analyse? Where is my judgement being called for? In this instance, the question is asking you to analyse the concept of progress in the Christian life and then make an informed judgement as to extent. That's going to take some synthesising and evaluating, isn't it?

(to be continued)