The Simple Truth
We’re all creatures of habit and it’s easy to fall into the same rhythms and patterns, repeatedly doing the same things in the same ways. How can we break free from routine and come up with new ideas and ways of doing things - to truly innovate? Sure there are some lucky lightning bolt moments of inspiration, but the most reliable path towards innovation is through research.
As an undergraduate university student, I had a great GPA, really liked the area I was studying, and was willing to put in the work. On paper I should have hit the ground running when I started my research career. But in all honesty I was a terrible researcher when I first started, because it took me years to realise this simple truth:
The transformation from “consumer of information” to “creator of knowledge” is a rare and unlikely process.
While I was a quick study and motivated by intellectual curiosity, I didn’t have the skills to tackle my research project in a logical and systematic way. This is Part 2 in this blog series on different strategies to develop skills in research training. Part 1 discusses the idea of information overload, and how to make sense of all the disparate sources relevant to a specific keyword or topic. If you followed these strategies, you should have the bare essentials to find out enough about any topic to have a solid foundation to build on. Specifically, you should be able to identify the gaps in the field, areas where people currently don’t have all the answers. Following on from this, today let’s talk about:
The Value of Experience
Up to this point all you’re doing is reading about a topic. You haven’t contributed to the field directly, just passively. To come up with new ideas within an existing field requires that you actually go out there and gather some new data that no-one else has. Come up with a research question, a hypothesis, and design a strategy to collect data to test your hypothesis. Having a big enough sample size in your study will help you avoid anecdotal findings or confirmation bias, and it’s worth both learning some basic statistics and talking to a statistician about your project design. People are much more likely to listen to any ideas you have if you have evidence to back it up, and once you have first hand experience in gathering new data about a topic there’s more weight to what you’re saying.
Granted this is a huge leap in complexity from doing an initial literature search to then conduct experiments that no-one else has done before. This indeed is where most students get temporarily stuck. Coming up with an innovative research question is genuinely hard, not to mention having the equipment, skills and expertise to know how to test any theories you might have. This brings us to:
Re-learning how to learn.
In formal schooling and education, the vast majority of assessment is still in the form of written exams. Yes it’s possible to write questions that test complex problem-solving, but most of them still are testing your ability to remember pieces of information. In Bloom’s taxonomy, a hierarchy of learning complexity, remembering or memorising is the simplest form of learning. You answer the same practice questions again and again over time, and you’ll remember it. It’s not complex, it just takes a lot of time and effort to beat the forgetting curve. When you’re trying to think outside the box, and come up with brand new ideas no-one has heard of before - this is constructing new knowledge - all the way up the top of Bloom’s taxonomy. The most complex of all the learning that you can do as an individual.
This type of work is unlike anything you’ve been exposed to in your entire educational or even professional experiences, so to actually do research well you need to re-learn how to learn, and unlearn many of the habits and behaviours that you have used to succeed or survive up to this point.
This is an incredibly hard step to take, and in all likelihood you’ll have to rise through the ranks gradually. But by taking the initial steps in planning a research project, you’ll already be putting many of the higher order skills into action:
Applying the information you’ve read about towards your own research question,
Collecting and analysing new data
Using it to address a gap in the field and re-evaluate your pre-conceived notions about a certain idea.
Like most skills research is something best learnt through application, putting in the work and doing it rather than just reading about it.
Jack.
