What We Don’t Know

This is an idea that’s been featured on this blog before, but I think it bears repeating every few months:
Sometimes we need to know more about our topic area before we can even begin to formulate a research question.

This was recently brought to mind for me again while I was enjoying a show on PBS called History of Science: How Did we Get Here? (It’s quite fun if you’re into that sort of thing! Here’s a bit about it: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/nlmcatalog/101566118). I was winding down after a day of reference librarian-ing (very professional term for what we do) and yet I was still thinking about research. (What can I say? I live for this stuff.)  The narrator of the show discussed how many of the most important scientific discoveries about our planet, our place in geological history, and our beginnings didn’t come about until scientists had the right environment and context TO ask these important questions.

Seems like a simple idea in retrospect. But imagine a world where everyone believes the world is flat. How would you know to ask what’s at the center of the spherical earth if you think it is flat?

It’s humbling to realize how we don’t even know what we don’t know right now, at this very moment in our personal lives or as a global society.

Who could imagine what a little bit of new information about a topic could reveal to us? The more we know about a subject, the more able we are to think critically about it and formulate a research question.

Being able to recognize that there’s a lot we don’t even KNOW we don’t know is the first step toward a critical research question. 

After that, how do you begin to find out what you don’t know? How do you find that new information and fill in the gaps? Reference Sources (encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks) are a good place to start getting background information about a subject.  This background information could be the flint that sparks your imagination to develop a critical question about the subject matter! And that is how the fires of burning research questions are born.

Advertisement