Career learning opportunities

The Career Development Association of New Zealand (CDANZ), has a great list of webinars, papers and interview recordings for members to use for professional development. We can find a treasure trove of ideas under the professional learning tab.

There are two links that I have been using a lot lately, to look for something new when it is (a) finally quiet during the Covid-19 times and I want a boost, and (b) when - as local branch co-chair - considering professional development for the branch. Those links are here (or http://www.cdanz.org.nz/professional-learning/webinars/past-webinars/) to retrospectively review webinars, papers and interviews which took place previously; or here (or http://www.cdanz.org.nz/professional-learning/events/professional-learning-opportunities/) for learning that is about to occur, or will occur in the coming months.

For example, I downloaded watched the Tristram Hooley presentation for CDANZ, "Covid-19, career guidance and social justice" (CDANZ, 2020a), which was really interesting; and our next branch PD will consist of us screencasting via Zoom the CDAA paid presentation by Jennifer Luke on "Big Data and Career Development" (CDANZ, 2020a). The latter we purchased easily from the link on the CDANZ webpage to the CDAA, using a credit card.

In addition, I have also found these accessible lists of learning has in turn inspired other ideas for professional development, which the branch is currently exploring. If these ideas pan out, and we are able to record the sessions, we may in turn be able to share these with other branches.

Demand at the moment have become quite unpredictable, appearing to be all on one day, or all off the next, so timing has been a key element when accessing the existing online resources. The flexibility to be able to choose when I undertake my PD has meant I don't have to worry if I can make the time, at the time.

Enriching my practice with new ideas has certainly helped me buoy my spirits during what has been a difficult and emotional time.


Sam

References:

• CDANZ (2020a). Online PD Opportunities. http://www.cdanz.org.nz/professional-learning/events/professional-learning-opportunities/
• CDANZ (2020b). Professional Learning. http://www.cdanz.org.nz/professional-learning/

Disappearing Jump Lists in Windows 10

If you don't know what 'jump lists' are, they are a right-click list of files linked from a programme pinned to your task bar that we can select and shortcut to. They are great for items that you use regularly, as they are available right on our desktops. So if we have Word pinned to our task bar, then a right-click on the Word icon will open all the Word shortcuts that we have permanently pinned, in addition to those that we have opened recently, up to a fixed number. Windows default number is 12.

Over time I have expanded my jump list files to 25 per software item pinned to my taskbar. The software apps that I use this many files for are File Explorer, Access, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Publisher, Adobe Acrobat, Notepad, Outlook, and Calibre. Most have about 15 files 'pinned', with the remaining links being projects I am currently working on. These turn over regularly. The exception is File Explorer, where most of the 25 are pinned items: folders I access regularly.

Collectively these jump lists are very, very useful. They are very handy for both navigating to recently opened folders, for files which I just had open, and want to go back to, or for files which I use very regularly. These lists save me a lot of time, and so increase my productivity.

However, with a Windows 365 update recently, my jump lists were all cut down to 12. This meant that effectively I lost 60% of my efficiency in one fell swoop. Worse, many of the recently popular links were the ones to get wiped out.

A Google search soon found me a solution. Burgess (31 December 2018) explained how to restore the overall number from 10 back to 25, as follows:

• Do a full system back up
• Then go to:

• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

• Right-click on Advanced. Select New > DWORD (32-bit) Value. Name the value:

• JumpListItems_Maximum

• Double-click on the JumpListItems_Maximum key you created. Change the Value data to the number of jump list items you want. In my case, this was 25.
• Then close Registry Editor.

That's it. The next time Windows 365 updates, I will be alert for it reverting to the default number of 12.


Sam

• Reference: Burgess, B. (31 December 2018). How to Increase the Number of Jump List Items on Windows 10. https://www.groovypost.com/howto/increase-the-number-of-jump-list-items-on-windows-10/

Outlook Web App cannot delay delivery

For a while I have been meaning to find out how I can schedule emails on the Outlook web app to send later, and during the Covid-19 lockdown I finally decided to dig in and find out how to do this.

I did a search online for "delay delivery in outlook web app". I found some instructions to delay delivery online, but was unable to completely apply the instructions, as a key element, "More Options", did not appear to be available in the web Outlook client (uis371, 23 May 2011). So I moderated my search to "delay delivery in outlook web app, don't have more options", and got some very interesting results.

The first (Microsoft Community, 28 April 2020) was from a Microsoft moderator, Seven Zhou, who explained that this feature is not 'feasible' in the "Outlook Web App since delay delivery is an Outlook client feature". Hmm. I wondered why it wasn't 'feasible'. Perhaps Microsoft just couldn't be arsed coding it for online use? Did they want to keep making money from differentiating the client? But perhaps I am being unfair. It is probably much more complicated than that.

However, Seven Zhou went on to point the user to the Microsoft Voice page, to request the feature to be added. Seven said "your ideas will help us to make our product and features better for you" (Microsoft Community, 28 April 2020).

This was the second useful result. I thought this was good advice, and, as Seven had provided a link, I went and voted for this feature to be added. You can too, here (Microsoft Voice, n.d.).

Perhaps one day we will have the same functionality across both on and offline versions of Outlook.


Sam

References

• Microsoft Community (28 April 2020). Office 365 - Unable to schedule an email for later delivery, no "Options" tab, business account. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/office-365-unable-to-schedule-an-email-for-later/0dbabdb8-a41b-439c-842a-a6806cdbc71a
• Microsoft Voice (n.d.). The new Outlook on the web (Office 365). https://outlook.uservoice.com/forums/907141--the-new-outlook-on-the-web-office-365?query=Need%20Delay%20Delivery%20on%20Outlook%20Web%20App
• uis371 (23 May 2011). Delay sending email through Outlook and OWA. https://youtu.be/0PcVjQ_Koag

Using the forward slash or solidus

Using the Solidus (Waddingham, 2014, p. 90)

We should try to avoid forward slashes (solidi) in the normal run of academic writing. It is better for us to use a conjunction instead - such as ‘or’ - as this interrupts the flow of the writing less for reader.

However, a solidus shouldn’t be used as an ‘and’ conjunction: it was created for use with currency: for example, 10/6, showing ten shillings and six pennies in pre-decimal currency (i.e. pounds shillings and pence). 

Today it is more commonly used to present alternatives - options - to the reader, not present concepts as 'both'. While common usage in texting and digital media is moving solidi towards being an ‘and’ as well as an 'or' conjunction, academic writing has not yet embraced this.

While this may be another case to 'watch this space' for writing style evolution, if we do make the transition to a solidus meaning 'and', we will end up needing another way to punctuate for 'or'. Otherwise our writing will lose clarity.

My source for most of my information on these matters is that most revered guide to style, New Hart's Rules, from the Oxford University Press team (Waddingham, 2014).

The book has a fabulous chapter on diacriticals (punctuation), and another wonderful one on spelling. There are sections on capitalisation, names, abbreviations, bibliographies and indexing. It also contains a glossary of printer's terms.

Get yourself a copy pf Waddington (2014) if you haven't already. It's gold.

Sam

• Reference: Waddingham, A. (Ed.) (2014). New Hart's Rules: The Oxford style guide (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.

The pyramid scheme that was Maslow

Source: Thompkins-Jones (24 July 2014)

In 1943, a psychologist called Abraham Maslow presented a framework in a paper proposing that we humans had a stepped range of needs, called the hierarchy of needs. Maslow says in his paper that while the needs appear to be progressive, they are not equally important to individuals, and further notes that he does not want to "give the false impression that a need must be satisfied 100 per cent before the next need emerges" (1943, p. 389). He provides an example that an average person might reach "85 per cent in [their] physiological needs, 70 per cent in [their] safety needs, 50 per cent in [their] love needs, 40 per cent in [their] self-esteem needs, and 10 per cent in [their] self-actualization needs" (p. 390). And note those headings: they too have changed since Maslow wrote his original psychology paper.

Researcher John Ballard hunted through the "Maslow archives at the Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron in Ohio", and after an extensive and wide-ranging research programme with his fellow authors, Todd Bridgman and Stephen Cummings, "found no trace of Maslow framing his ideas in pyramid form” (2019, p. 82). They further note that up until the 1980s, the preferred model for Maslow's hierarchy of needs was a ladder, where the reader could imagine simultaneous points of contact with different rungs. This ladder framework is more in keeping with what Maslow outlines in his original 1943 paper. Maslow's ideas do not fit a pyramid.

What is also interesting is how Maslow's work transferred from psychology to management. Bridgman et al. state "Douglas McGregor [..] encountered it in 1944 and drew on it in developing his famous Theory X and Theory Y concept" (2019, p. 84). Correspondence which followed between the two academics resulted in McGregor championing the hierarchy of needs; in industry, at conferences, and publishing papers about it. McGregor's interest arose at an opportune time when returned service people were coming back from WW2 in Europe and the Pacific, and enrolling at university. The GI Bill for returned service people included fully-funded MBAs from a grateful American public.

It was McGregor who made Maslow famous, although until the early 1960s, Maslow's thinking which inspired McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y was hidden, unacknowledged, within McGregor's work (Bridgman et al., 2019). Maslow's hierarchy first appears as a demi-ziggurat image by Davis (1957, as cited by Bridgman et al., 2019), and then as a pyramid from McDermid (1960, as cited by Bridgman et al., 2019). Both of models are clearly targeting business readers, being published respectively in Human Relations in Business, and Business Horizons (Bridgman et al., 2019). Maslow is now a management hot property, complete with a shape which means change in mathematics, with the layers of the model named as physiological needs, safety, social, esteem, and self-realisation needs (McDermid, 1960, as cited by Bridgman et al., 2019). Note the changes of rung names from paragraph one.

Many elements got lost as time ticked on, such as Maslow's initial idea that people can be at many stages, all at once (1942). In a later book, Maslow talks about transcendence, which seems to imply there may be a level past that of self-actualisation (1962). Maslow also proposes that, to be healthy and to grow, humans need to use their capacities - such as striving, physiology, intelligence, and love - or potentially may suffer from either physical or psychic disease (1962). These ideas have not been reflected in the pyramid that the management field has adopted.

After the experiences of WW2, Maslow sought peace, yet we have "ignore[d] some of [his] more egalitarian principles" (MacLellan, 2019). Additionally, Maslow had some interesting ideas about women - saying about Mexican women that "one woman is about as good as another, and that she is interchangeable with others. She discovers that she is not valuable; it is the class 'woman' that is valuable" in the eyes of Mexican men (1962, p. 121). Ouch.

Maslow was a free-thinker, and his thinking probably still has value: even if we have not been able to gather research evidence that his model actually works in practice. We do, however, need to remind ourselves that his model is: (a) not a pyramid; (b) not sequential; (c) not absolute; and (d) is not a management model.

If we read what Maslow originally wrote, then it is a useful as a lens to consider what may be holding us - or others - back.


Sam

References:

• Ballard, J.A. (2006). The diffusion of Maslow’s motivation theory in management and other disciplines. Paper presented at the 66th Academy of Management Annual Meeting, Knowledge, Action and the Public Concern,11-16 August, Atlanta GA, USA.
• Bridgman, T., Cummings, S., & Ballard, J. A. (2019). Who Built Maslow’s Pyramid? A History of the Creation of Management Studies’ Most Famous Symbol and Its Implications for Management Education. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 18(1), 81–98. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2017.0351
• MacLellan, L. (11 April 2019). Maslow’s pyramid” is based on an elitist misreading of the psychologist's work. https://qz.com/work/1588491/maslow-didnt-make-the-pyramid-that-changed-management-history/
• Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370-96. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054346
• Maslow, A. H. (1962). Toward a Psychology of Being. D Van Nostrand Company Inc.
• Thompkins-Jones, R. (24 July 2014). Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Applied to Employee Engagement. https://notesfromanaspiringhumanitarian.com/illustration-applies-maslows-hierarchy-of-needs-to-employee-engagement/

Google Chrome shortcuts

We can forget sometimes that there are a number of ways to do things: hangovers from the time before computer mice, when the keyboard was king. I am talking about the world of the hotkeys and keyboard shortcuts.

I was reminded of some of those handy little tricks the other day, as I have been having sudden PC shutdowns. Luckily, Chrome remembers what we have had open, and we can simply go back into our history, and reopen those tabs that we had open before everything went black.

However, there is also a shortcut to do the same thing, once Chrome is open, simply key Shift, Ctrl & T, and you will reopen the Chrome tabs which were last open.

If we want to close our currently open tab, then we can key Ctrl & W. To open it again, simply key Shift, Ctrl & T again (if we keep using this command, it will reopen all our tabs in the order that we closed them).

To open a new tab and go to it, key Ctrl & T. To go to the right-most tab, key Ctrl & 9. To open a new window, Ctrl & N.

There is a full list of Google Chrome shortcuts here.


Sam

References:

• Google Support (2020). Chrome keyboard shortcuts. https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/157179?hl=en
• Comptuter Hope (12 January 2019). Google Chrome shortcut keys. https://www.computerhope.com/shortcut/chrome.htm

Pushing back ignorance, one fact at a time

Gapminder is a "fact tank" founded by Hans Rosling, who was the Swedish population scientist/epidemiologist up until his death two years ago, along with his son, Ola Rosling, and daughter in law, Anna Rosling Rönnlund (Gapminder, 2020a; Wikiprogress, 2020). Ole Rosling created the 'Trendalyser' software used in the early Gapminder videos, which was purchased by Google in 2007 (Wikiprogress, 2020).

Gapminder's mission is - more or less - to lower the level of global ignorance through providing free and easy to understand statistical graphics. They say "The mission of Gapminder Foundation is to fight devastating ignorance with a fact-based worldview that everyone can understand" (Gapminder, 2020b). An example of their graphical work can be seen here, showing a comparison of income and life expectancy by class since 1800 (Gapminder, 2020c).

Since Hans's death, Ole and Anna are carrying on the fact-finding work. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation supports them, along with a number of Scandinavian families (Gapminder, 2020a). Both Ola and Anna have produced videos during Covid-19 to help push back ignorance, a few facts at a time (Gapminder Foundation, 1 May 2020, 25 April 2020):





Pushing back ignorance, one fact at a time.


Sam

References:

• Gapminder Foundation (1 May 2020). Most are wrong about the number of old. https://youtu.be/Jmqcd_IImLI
• Gapminder Foundation (25 April 2020). Corona is canceling flights but not teaching us to solve global warming. https://youtu.be/-_asLII6J0k
• Gapminder (2020a). About us. https://www.gapminder.org/about-gapminder/
• Gapminder (2020b). Ignornance. https://www.gapminder.org/ignorance/
• Gapminder (2020c). Income level versus life expectancy by nation and class. https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$state$time$value=2019&delay:241.367741935484;&entities$filter$;&dim=geo;&marker$axis_x$domainMin:null&domainMax:null&zoomedMin=240&zoomedMax=152481;&axis_y$domainMin:null&domainMax:null&zoomedMin=1.569&zoomedMax=211&scaleType=log;&size$domainMin:null&domainMax:null&extent@:0.016666666666666666&:0.4166666666666667;;&color$which=income_groups;;;&ui$chart$trails:false;;&chart-type=bubbles
• Wikiprogress (2020). Gapminder. http://wikiprogress.org/articles/archive/gapminder/

Short-term thinking and poverty

I watched a very interesting TED talk a while ago, about poor people and short-term thinking. It doesn't seem to matter - according to the presenter, Rutger Bregman (14 Jun 2017) - if we are short of time, money, food or sleep: when we are 'poor' in these areas, our time horizon shortens, and we make worse decisions than we would make if we weren't poor.

Rutger talked about a study done in India with sugar cane farmers who had 60% of their income delivered at harvest time. For half the year they were comparably wealthy: for the other half the year they were relatively poor. The researchers measured the IQ of the farmers at the time of greatest wealth, as compared to the time of greatest poverty, and found that their IQs had decreased 14 points when they were poorest.

What the researchers found is that with poverty of any type, we become short-term thinkers, and appear less able to plan for the future, to defer what we can have now, for a mythical time which may never come. I am guessing that poverty triggers a type of flight or fight response in our little button heads. Rutger (14 Jun 2017) referred to this as the scarcity principle (Shafir, 2017).

Rutger (14 Jun 2017) quoted George Orwell, who wrote in Down and Out in Paris and London, "the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future" (1933, p. 20). As you can see, George thought that obliterating the future was a good thing. The rest of us, not so much.

Overall, what Rutger (14 Jun 2017) presented was a compelling initial argument for a universal basic income, citing a town in Canada, Dauphin, which had done just this in the 1970s (until the Canadian national government changed). Health costs were lowered, educational markers increased, crime decreased, and people were happier. The data is there (Forget, 2011).

I have written about a universal basic income before (here), and personally would like to see it happen. However, it needs to be a country which has a strong sense of social responsibility, and a drive for equality. I suspect it is going to be Denmark, Norway, or Finland, which finally takes the first step. I hope it might be New Zealand, but that is wishful thinking.

Sweden has experimented with it. Switzerland voted on it. Someone simply needs to do it, and the rest of the world - except the Americans - will follow, because it is the right thing to do.


Sam

References:

• Bregman, R. (14 Jun 2017). TED: Poverty isn't a lack of character; it's a lack of cash. https://youtu.be/ydKcaIE6O1k
• Forget, E. L. (2011). The town with no poverty: The health effects of a Canadian guaranteed annual income field experiment. Canadian Public Policy, 37(3), 283-305. https://doi.org/10.3138/cpp.37.3.283
• Orwell, G. (1933). Down and Out in Paris and London. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
• Shafir, E. (2017). Decisions in poverty contexts. Current Opinion in Psychology, 18(12), 131-136. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.08.026

The transcripts time factor

When I did my Master's degree a number of years ago, I went to what I called "Transcription Hell" (I have written other posts which you can read here). You see, when I applied for my research ethics, I thought idly about paying to get someone to transcribe my recorded data, but with the opportunity cost of the Master's, and the naivete of "how hard can it be?", I decided that I should be able to push on and do it myself.

Ha, ha: what a flaming nightmare THAT was. To begin with, I had to keep going back and back and back over what I had recorded to actually hear what was said, Play, pause. Rewind. Play, pause. Rewind. Play, pause.

I couldn't type fast enough to get the words as they were said. After a few days of being demoralised, I hit on the brainwave of getting some transcription software, and cheerfully bought Dragon NaturallySpeaking, fondly believing that I could just play the recordings to Dragon and it would hear it and transcribe it for me. Would it what!

Instead I still had to listen to the data, and just speak it aloud for Dragon to hear my voice. It also took me probably 10 hours of work to train Dragon to hear a Kiwi accent, and it still could not hear "umm" by the end of my hundreds of hours of transcription time.

"Eeek: 'Hundreds of hours'?", I hear you shriek? Yes. I worked out that there was a factor of 60 in transcribing data. I found that it took me a minute to process for every second of recording. Thus each hour of data took roughly sixty hours. I had 20 hours of recordings, so that added up to about 1200 hours. It took me five months to get it done, in and amongst other things that I had on my plate.

Yes, transcription hell.

So when I read Getchen McCulloch's book, "Because Internet", recently, I was most gratified to read that "[i]t takes about an hour of skilled human work per minute of audio recording to get speech into a transcript usable for linguistic analysis: to transcribe the overall gist, to go back and add detailed phonetic information, to extract parts and analyze their acoustic frequencies or sentence structure." (2019)*.

Ah, yes! It appears that the ratio I found for transcription was pretty bang on.

In tackling a PhD, one of the first things I did was to tee up a transcription service. There is no way I am going to transcription hell again.


Sam

• Reference: McCulloch, G. (2019). Because Internet: Understanding How Language is Changing [ePub]. Random House. https://southisland.overdrive.com/southisland-nelson/content/media/4936397 * sorry, I can't give you a page number because this is an ePub, but this quote is in Chapter 1

Using quartiles in Excel

When I am analysing semester results from my classes, I have some standard measures that I use. Those standard measures are: an average mark for each assessment; a lower quartile, which shows the minimum value for assessment; a 50th percentile, which shows the median value; and an upper quartile, which shows the maximum value.

When we are working in Excel these are exceptionally easy to set up. The formula for the quartiles is:

=QUARTILE(array, quartile value)

The quartile function includes an array, which is the range of the cells that you want the quartile to return a value for; and which particular quartile you want to measure (ie, minimum value, first quartile, median, third, or maximum).

Each one of these has a number which goes into the formula.
0 = Minimum value
1 = First quartile (25th percentile)
2 = Median value (50th percentile)
3 = Third quartile (75th percentile)
4 = Maximum value

So my median quartile might look like this:

=QUARTILE(A3:A75,2)

It is very easy when you know how!


Sam

• Reference: Support.Office (2020). QUARTILE function. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/quartile-function-93cf8f62-60cd-4fdb-8a92-8451041e1a2a

Referencing journal issue months using APA 7th edition

I had an interesting question on APA 7th edition when referencing a journal which had not specified an issue number, but instead has a month. The reference was provided as:

Byrd, H., Ho, A., Sharp, B., & Kumar-Nair, N. (2013). Measuring the solar potential of a city and its implications for energy policy. Energy Policy, 61(October), 944-952. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2013.06.042

I looked in my APA manual, but this use of month over issue number was not mentioned. So I went to the blog of APA Style, and asked one of the APA elves, who replied:

If your journal uses the month as its issue number - October in this case - then you should format it like this: 61(10), [u]sing the numerical equivalent of the month provides a clear "number" for your issue (Adams, 1 October 2019).

So the resulting reference reads:

Byrd, H., Ho, A., Sharp, B., & Kumar-Nair, N. (2013). Measuring the solar potential of a city and its implications for energy policy. Energy Policy, 61(10), 944-952. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2013.06.042

Easy when we know how.


Sam

• Reference: Adams, A. (1 October 2019). The “Issue” With Issue Numbers in Journal Articles [Q&A section 16 April 2020]. https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/issue-numbers

Scoping a research question

Steps in formulating a research problem (after Kumar, 2019, p. 87)

While I have written about scoping research questions many times before (here), I have not specifically talked about steps that undergraduate students can take to scope a research question. There is, however, a great book by Ranjit Kumar, which outlines exactly how to do that (2019).

Scoping from the topic to the research question is broken down into seven steps, as follows (Kumar, 2019, pp. 85-87, and see the image accompanying this post showing the management example given below):

1. "Identify a broad field or subject area of interest". It is really important to find a topic that will keep us interested for the fifteen weeks of our course. If we get sick of our topic in two weeks, we won't keep looking for information, or push through to completion and a pass mark. Let's use staff motivation as our topic example.
2. "Dissect the broad area into subareas". Dig into the literature and chop up our topic area into sectors as we are reading. For example, we might come up with: motivation theory, performance, turnover, development, engagement, behaviour, commitment, psychological contract (there are more, but this will do for our purposes).
3. "Select what is of most interest". As we read the literature in our area, we will start to get interested in a few areas. Chose one that really makes us want to read more. For example, how does the psychological contract affect organisational turnover? We will do some more reading, and realise that there is a psychological contract theory, which may form our theoretical framework.
4. "Raise research questions". This is then going to us get thinking on what all the questions are that we could ask. Note them all down. For example, what is PCT? How does the PCT relate to turnover? What makes staff decide to leave? Who do we need to ask? How will we find our participants if they have already left an organisation? Will any organisation be interested in our research and want to participate?
5. "Formulate objectives". Now it is time to sift all our questions, and try to group them into just a few main questions that will - collectively - answer our main research question.
6. "Assess your objectives". We need to be careful in assessing just how much work is involved in the project; to evaluate whether we have enough time to do the job; to consider whether we have all the resources we need; to think about our expertise, and that of our supervisor in this field; and lastly we need to think about whether [supermarket] will be able and willing to share their data and their past employee contact details with us.
   
7. "Double-check". that we are engaged in this area; that our aims will answer our question; that we can do it in the time we have; that we have the expertise and help to deliver to the level required; and that the [supermarket]is willing - in principle - to discuss the project with us.

While I wish that the author had written the book at undergraduate level, it is definitely a post-graduate text with doctoral complexity. However, the tools, such as this model, can definitely be reworked to fit with undergraduate study.

Below is a link to a chapter from Kumar (2019) plus some other resources to help undergraduates form a research question. I hope this post helps :-)


Sam

References:

• Kennedy, M. (2006). What Makes a Research Question Answerable? https://msu.edu/user/mkennedy/digitaladvisor/Research/whatanswerable.htm
• Kumar, R. (2019). Research Methodology (5th ed.). SAGE Publications Ltd.
  Chapter 4 is downloadable from https://uk.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/103505_Chapter_4_Kumar5e.pdf?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_content=9L0576A&utm_campaign=not+tracked&utm_term=
• McCombes, S. (18 April 2019). Research question examples. https://www.scribbr.com/research-process/research-question-examples/
• McCombes, S. (16 April 2019). Developing strong research questions. https://www.scribbr.com/research-process/research-questions/
• Morris, K. (26 February 2019). 50 Mini-Lessons For Teaching Students Research Skills. http://www.kathleenamorris.com/2019/02/26/research-lessons/
• Monash University (2020). Developing research questions. https://www.monash.edu/rlo/research-writing-assignments/understanding-the-assignment/developing-research-questions
• Scribbr (2 January 2020). How to Develop a STRONG Research Question. https://youtu.be/71-GucBaM8U

Whakatauki: He waka eke noa

Ah, the Covid-19 pandemic. If there was ever a need for a Whakatauki, this has to be it.

And this is my selection for the crisis: He waka eke noa. This is perfect because we are indeed all in the waka together, and there are no exceptions.

Woodward suggests that how this works in practice is when "a group of you are going to the movies but one of them doesn't have any money so wouldn't be able to go along. You can say he waka eke noa, meaning you will pay as you are all in one group and it would not be the same if they were to miss out" (2020).

It shows how we care for each other and support each other as Whanau, as a community.

Tough times should remind us of just how important he waka eke noa is.


Sam

• Reference: Woodward, R. (2020). Maori Proverbs Whakataukī. https://www.maori.cl/Proverbs.htm