Portfolio: Research Question Development Portfolio
Due date: Thursday, 23 March, 11.59pm Australian Eastern Standard Time
Marks out of: 100
Weighting: 30%
Purpose: Address course objectives 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6.
This assessment will take some time to work through, so it is imperative that you start
working on the assessment requirements as soon as you enrol in the course.
This Assessment is made of up five key parts. Each part should be completed as they will be
important to your success in the remaining course assessment.
Part A – Development of the research Question
Part B – Reflection on research question development
Part C – Interpreting Information through Annotated Bibliography
Part D – Management of research to create a Research Question
Part E – Reflection on Research Techniques and associated factors
All the parts to this Assessment item should be submitted in the stipulated order in a word
document (or similar format). Students are encouraged to use tools such as Table of
Contents and associated formatting to show the distribution of the items throughout the
assessment which aligns with the structure provided here. There is an exception to this rule,
which includes an annotated file in Part B, which must be submitted separately within the
assessment portal. For this file, within the assessment itself, students are encouraged to
include statements such as: “refer to submitted document insert name of document”
Required submission documents:
• Editable document (word document or similar) containing all five parts of the portfolio.
o Name the file using the following scheme: Surname_Student ID_ Portfolio
• Scan or image of the annotated journal article
o Name the file using the following scheme: Surname_Student ID_ Annotated
Where:
Surname is your last name or ‘family’ name; and
Student ID is your UniSQ student ID number e.g. 0061234567
Part A – Development of the research question with peer interaction (40 marks)
This first assessment part will be instrumental to the remainder of your studies in this course
throughout the semester.
You are expected to develop a research question to investigate throughout the semester. All
your assessment will be focused around this question, so it is anticipated that you will spend
the first few weeks of the semester working on this question, and refining it so that you can
use it produce a literature review and an online recorded presentation. There is material
provided in the study guide that will guide each student through the development of this
question (Section 4.1 of the Study Guide).
In addition to the development of this research question, you need to post your research
question for peer review during the first few weeks prior to the assessment due date, and
additionally you will be assessed on your peer review of other student’s research questions.
You will be assessed on how constructively you both use your peer’s reviews, and how
constructive your own responses are to your peers.
Step 1
Post your research question to the devoted discussion forum. Make your
subject heading your surname and general topic overview of the question.
For example, if I was exploring a research question about ultraviolet radiation and
its behaviour under certain circumstances my discussion thread subject line
might be:
Turner, UV radiation
This is to help distinguish your question from your peers’ questions and make it
easy to find when on the Research Question Discussion Forum.
When you post your question in the main text box make sure you include:
• A statement of your tentative research question (review Section 4.1 of the
Study Guide before doing this)
• Include a paragraph on why you want to research the topic, as well as the
entire research question itself. Aim for a minimum of 100 words to explain
the reasons why you want to research the question.
• Invite your peers to discuss your research question.
Important – post your question only once. Refer to the protocol guide in the
forum about this.
Step 2
Choose two different students in the course who have also posted their research
question.
Read their posts and provide some constructive feedback. Provide a minimum of
100 words constructive feedback per response.
Use the study guide’s research question development guide to help you build up
your understanding of how to develop a research question and to be constructive
to your peer. You may also benefit from reviewing Section 4.5 of the Study Guide
on peer review. That section is better geared to later assessments, but it may be
helpful.
An additional document “Research question Peer Review” has been created to
provide extra detail for this step in the assessment process. It will be available in
the devoted discussion forum. Please read this document thoroughly.
Students should not provide feedback to a peer if that peer has already
received two peer responses. Similarly do not withdraw feedback to a peer
because you believe you can answer another peer’s question “better”. This
is unethical practice. Please refer to the additional assessment document
(“Research question Peer Review”) for protocol around this issue.
Step 3
Respond to each of the students who have provided constructive feedback on
your research question. Answer their questions and carefully consider their
comments. If you do not understand the feedback provided, try replying and
rephrasing what they have said to confirm the meaning. Ask if what you have
written matches their meaning. Then try answering the question or responding to
the comment as you have interpreted it.
As you continue the dialogue with your peer, consider how to revise your
research question if the discussion suggests a revision may improve the
question. Always restate the research question in the course forum conversation
to show how the question develops with the feedback provided. If you feel that
there is evidence to show that feedback provided will not improve the research
question, provide feedback to the peer explaining this and justify why you believe
the question is suitable in whatever form it currently is in.
Once you are satisfied that you have revised the research question as well as
possible based on the discussion held, post your research question in the
Research Question Identification Portal. This helps the course examiner
manage each question, and ensure there are no double ups, or use of questions
that are too similar to previous course offers.
Important
Students who offer no feedback of their own to others will be unlikely to receive
feedback themselves. Some students may believe forgoing the marks associated
with providing feedback to others will assist them in completing the remainder of
the assessment more quickly (or in a compressed timeframe). I strongly
discourage all students from using this process in this course. Not only does this
result you losing 40% of the marks of the first assessment, it means the
framework on which later assessment is built will not be as effective or useful.
The value of offering feedback and receiving feedback is very important in this
first assessment. If you do not participate in this process, you will be
disadvantaged in the long term, because the lack of discussion may result in a
poorly designed question, which can affect your later assessment items and
result in lower grades.
To provide evidence within your assessment submission for Part A, take screen shots
of all the forum conversations (i.e. – those of the peers your reviewed, and those who
peer reviewed you) and include them in the Assessment word document for this part.
Divide them into sections so that the conversation with each peer is demonstrated as
an obvious conversation. You may have up to four conversations to present in this
part of the assessment.
There are more detailed instructions, FAQ and forum protocols provided within the Research
Question Development Forum. Please read these thoroughly before commencing with this
task.
Part B – Reflection on research question development (20 marks).
Students should work through the exercises provided to develop their research question.
1. Using the techniques learned in the reflective writing module and workshop, provide
a written reflective statement that explores the process of how you developed your
research question.
2. The process needing to be explored should focus on the tasks you were assigned in
this course to help create your question (question development instruction guide,
discussing with peers on forum, discussing other’s questions etc). You may need to
refer to the topic the question is based on, but you should not solely discuss and
reflect on the research question topic. Students who reflect only the topic of the
question instead of on the development of the question itself, will receive zero marks
for this part.
3. This part should be no more than 300 words (does not include statement of the
research question).
4. State the research question first, then follow with the paragraph of reflection using
the 4Rs structure.
Notes about the research question development.
• The discussion with peers in part A of this assessment may be used to contribute to
the reflection providing the peer is acknowledged by name or the online discussion is
cited. Do not copy text directly from the conversation.
• Research students who have already had a research question prior to this course
and exercise, are expected to devise an alternative research question and use that
for this exercise. Research students may choose something that might be
complementary to their research project, but must still complete the reflective
exercise. Research students should provide both their research question and
program research project question to demonstrate the difference between the two.
Part C – Interpreting Information through Annotated Bibliography (15 marks)
During the time spent developing a research question, you were tasked to read a variety of
scholarly journal articles, amongst other resources. Select one of these journal articles and
create a copy that you will need to use for annotation. Use the information provided to you
about annotating journal articles to carry out this part of the assessment.
Annotated journal article
The first section of this exercise is that you will demonstrate how you annotate the journal
article in order to prepare for composing a written annotated bibliography.
You can submit your annotated journal article in one of two ways.
Option 1: Print a legible copy of the journal article, and highlight and write your annotations
by hand. All annotations must be legible. Once completed, scan the annotated journal
article and submit as a single file to the assessment portal (pdf is preferred for this particular
part of the assessment). It is the student’s responsibility to ensure the scanned copy is also
legible. Scans that cannot be read will be marked according to the marking guidelines.
Option 2: Download a digital copy of the journal article, and highlight and write your
annotations digitally. You might want to consider using a software such as PDF annotator.
Save the annotated file and submit as a single file to the assessment portal.
Please name the document using the following format:
Surname_ Student ID_ Annotated
Compose an Annotated Bibliography
Using the annotated journal article, you will now compose an annotated bibliography for the
journal article.
The bibliography should be no more than 300 words and should not be a rewrite of the
abstract or conclusions of the article. There should not be any direct quotes in the annotated
bibliography. The exercise is to use your own words to complete the exercise.
Use the following information to create your Annotated Bibliography:
What is an annotated bibliography?
An annotated bibliography refers to a list of citations and discussion of peer-reviewed,
published scientific articles that are relevant to a particular research question. Do not use lay
articles (e.g. magazine or newspaper articles) or information from websites such as blogs or
social media conversations. You will only be assessed on an annotated bibliography from
peer-reviewed and journal-published scientific articles. The citation is followed by the
annotation, that is, a brief, descriptive and evaluative paragraph. The purpose of the
annotation is to inform the reader of the relevance, accuracy and quality of the sources cited.
You need to carefully consider the article that you select for your annotated bibliography. Keep
the following questions in mind to help clarify your choices.
• What topic am I investigating?
• What question(s) am I exploring? Identify the aim of your literature research.
• Am I being judicious in my selection of texts? Does each text relate to my research
topic (given above)?
• What are the essential or key articles available on my topic? Am I finding them?
You need to include the following information for the annotated bibliography in 300 words:
(1) Citation in the format indicated in the example below,
(2) Introduction to the article including background and/or hypothesis,
(3) Aims & Research methods employed by the article,
(4) Scope of the research undertaken,
(5) Usefulness of the findings to your particular topic (the topic in part A),
(6) Limitations of the research undertaken,
(7) Conclusions, and
(8) Reflection (explain how the findings from the article illuminates your topic).
An example is provided on the next page.
Note: The numbering provided within the following annotated bibliography is not necessary
for a final annotated bibliography submission. Students are recommended to remove the
numbers from their final assessment submission, but can use them during the composition
stage.
A second caution: Students should not use whole direct sentences from the journal article
to create the annotated bibliography. Students should aim to use their own words, as is
required for any document that seeks to paraphrase another’s work. Students are
recommended to check their annotated bibliography in Turnitin before submission. Any
matches in Turnitin will of course be used by markers to assess the level of appropriate work
by the student.
Below is a fictitious example of a citation and annotation that could be included in an
Annotated Bibliography on the topic ‘Reasons that students leave university studies’
(from http://www.lc.unsw.edu.au/ onlib/annotated_bib.html):
(1) Arry, CO, Lanse, B and Brown, JW 2011, ‘Student engagement and academic
performance: monitoring the influences of satisfaction in university learning activites and
performance in assessment’, Journal of Armchair Psychology, vol 110, no.12, pp. 156-164.
(2) In this article Arry et al. review the correlation between students actually enjoying and
engaging in their university studies with improvements in their assignment grades, motivation
and atrition from university studies. (3) The authors use data gained through questionnaires
and surveys of university students in Brisbane, Australia to try to identify the main causes of
poor performance in assessment tasks, often leading to attrition from study and whether this
is linked to less-engaging and boring learning activities. (4) Their research focuses on
assessing a range of more engaging learning activities such as work integrated learning and
employing online, interactive quizzes. (5) The article is useful to my research topic, as Arry et
al. suggest that there are numerous reasons for students to become dis-engaged, unmotivated
and to perform poorly in assessments. (6) The main limitation of the article is that the survey
sample was restricted to second year students in one location, (7) thus the authors indicate
that further, more extensive, research needs to be undertaken to develop a more in-depth
understanding of improvements in student engagement that lead to better academic
performance. (8) This article will not form the basis of my research; however it will be useful
supplementary information for my research on reasons for student attrition from university
studies.
Key: (1) Citation, (2) Introduction, (3) Aims & Research methods, (4) Scope, (5) Usefulness
(to your particular topic), (6) Limitations, (7) Conclusions, (8) Reflection (explain how this work
illuminates your topic). Note that the numbering here are to provide the examples’
context. Your final submission will not require the numbering to be included.
Part D – Management of research to create a Research Question (10 marks)
In the first week of the course, you were recommended to enrol in a course that provided the
instruction to learn how to use EndNote, a bibliographic management database. It is strongly
recommended you attend this class in person or online prior to completing this assessment.
Some students who have relied only on the recommended handbook (available online), have
missed important features of the software, and their assessments were compromised.
Please use all resources available to you to learn how to use EndNote correctly.
In this part, you will provide evidence of your understanding and usage of EndNote.
During your review of scholarly articles to develop your research question, and to identify an
article for Part B (Interpreting Information through Annotated Bibliography), you will have
compiled a collection of articles. Using your knowledge of EndNote, create an EndNote
library for your research question and enter the bibliographic details of each article correctly
into the EndNote Library.
Create the following:
1. Create a screen shot of your populated database in Endnote. You should only need
to create one screen shot to satisfy this part. (Please note – you do not have to take
an image of each individual database entry. You should set up your database to
show the entire list of database entries.)
2. Using the EndNote insert bibliography function, insert the citations for all the
references in your database, into a word processing document and generate a
formatted reference list of the resources. You must ensure that you have entered the
correct information about each resource, categorised it by the type of resource that it
is, and used Harvard AGPS6 style to format the reference list. Harvard AGPS6 style
referencing requirements are available through the library. This reference list will be
subject to standard grammatical and spelling requirements, including ensuring
acronyms are expanded fully, words are appropriately categorised etc.
3. Students must submit the word processor document, NOT a pdf document, so that
the formatting from EndNote can be observed by the marker. If a pdf document is
submitted, without the word processor evidence of use of EndNote (for
example the grey highlighting is evident of the coding in Word), the student
will automatically receive zero marks for this part.
4. Students should be aware that downloading a journal citation from google scholar
into Endnote, without carefully checking the citation could provide low to no grades.
While this process of creating citations may seem fast and easy, it can be prone to
errors, such as lack of capitalisation, or incorrect capitalisation, failure to provide the
full journal name, and various other errors. Students should aim to check all Endnote
citations are correct before submitting their work.
Should you have any issues with EndNote, please keep the examiner apprised. There are
alternatives for instances where EndNote will not function on a personal computer, however
any change to the above guidelines must be negotiated with the course examiner prior to
submission.
Part E – Reflection on Research Techniques and associated factors (15 marks)
You will use the information you have learned about reflective writing and self-reflection
techniques to complete this part.
This assessment will require a reflectively written piece about the following classes during
the workshop:
1. Scientific writing
2. Searching Reading and Referencing
3. Scientific criticism and peer review
Each reflective piece (per class listed above) should be within 300-500 words. Students
should reflect on a key point or feature about the topic presented in the class NOT
everything discussed in the class.
Hint: Repeating the content you learned about in the class is classified as “retell”. Reporting
only what you learned, will earn low to no marks. Ensure you review the 4Rs process to
complete this part appropriately.
Students are encouraged to review the recordings of the workshops again prior to writing
their reflection. There is no set item in each module that a student should reflect on, rather
each student should consider how that module may apply to themselves (use the reflective
process). Whether that is within the context of what they study or what they might do in a
future employment role, or some other feature, it should be the individual choice of each
student. Students should be extremely cautious of discussing this part of the assessment
together, as it may cause similar reflective pieces that will be examined within the Academic
Integrity context. Each student is strongly encouraged to work on these independently, as
would be the case for all of the assessment.
Example of Assessment 1 marking rubric