Research Assistant: Essential Questions

The results of your research should be more than just a regurgitation of the facts or a summary of other people?s ideas. They should be based on new ideas, explanation, analysis, and evaluation. The best way to ensure that your work is thoughtful and original is to pose an essential question and supporting questions for inquiry once you decide on a topic of study.

Essential questions have certain qualities:

• They point to the heart of a subject or topic, especially its controversies.
• They generate multiple plausible answers, perspectives, and research directions-leading to other questions.
• They cast old knowledge, ideas, texts in a new light; they make the familiar strange and the strange familiar.
• They lead to discovery and uncoverage, as opposed to ?coverage.? This means that you don't need to know all the information on a particular topic, but know essential information well. Less is more. Less is better. Go indepth in your study instead of trying to cover a topic that is too broad.
• Essential questions engender further and deepening interest in the subject.
• They are provocative, enticing, and engagingly framed.
• Essential questions are higher-order, in Bloom's sense: they are always matters of analysis, synthesis, and evaluative judgment. You must ?go beyond? the information given.
• Answers to essential questions cannot be found. They must be invented.

Examples of essential questions:

• What would life in America be like today if the two World Wars had not been fought?
• How might our lives be different if the popular vote selected the President?
• How do we learn about American life through fiction?
• What is poverty?
• Who is an American?
• How have attitudes of the American people been influenced by cinema over time?
• Is U.S. history a history of progress?

Supporting questions work with the essential question to provide background and guide the work on a particular unit of study. They tend to be more topic- and subject-specific. They provide subject- and topic-specific doorways to essential questions.
Unit questions frame a specific set of inquiries; they are designed to point to and uncover the essential question through the lens of particular topics and subjects.

For example, Is the gap between rich and poor any better now than it was 100 years ago? Do new technologies always lead to progress? are unit questions that guide inquiry for the essential question "Is U.S. history a history of progress?"

Other supporting questions that may provide background information for that essential question are: What is progress? Which events in our history could be defined as progress and which ones were not? Do events that result in shame or repression still lead to progress?

Use Ciardiello's categories as a guideline for writing the supporting questions. Consider writing questions from each of the four categories to cover the spectrum of higher-level thought on your topic.

In order for your research paper to be more than a game of Trivial Pursuit? you must critically and creatively process the information you find. By turning your topic into an an essential question and asking good supporting questions, you are ensuring that your results show evidence of original and inventive ideas based upon logical conclusions and thorough research.

Bibliography:
Ciardiello, Angelo. Did you ask a good question today? Alternative cognitive and metacognitive strategies. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. 42, 210-219, 1998.

McKenzie, Jamie. Beyond Technology: Questioning, Research, and the Information Literate School. Bellingham, WA: FNO Press, 2000.

Wiggins, Grant and McTighe, Jay. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1998.