What makes a researcher independent and how this can be practised? How to enable any such skill among PhD/Post-Doc students, or even before that stage? Please Feel Free to add your observation, arguments and experience.
Fail a lot. Get inconclusive data, struggle, and don't be shamed for making mistakes. By making a lot of mistakes you learn why stuff actually works. If you are programming all those error messages are a necessary step to getting a functional algorithm. One smart thing you could do is put a bunch of unique print statements in your code, and see if you code crashes before or after the print statements. Those are flags actually.
Positive controls often don't actually exist in experimentation. That means you would have to know a condition that works. If you knew what worked then you wouldn't be struggling so much. Negative controls often are implementable, though. Design a parallel experiment that shouldn't work because it is missing a probably important parameter. If it actually works then something is wrong with your experimental condition.
Dear Fida and Adron,
Interesting question and not directly my field of research, but as this forum is about inspiration as well, I was thinking of related questions that I have worked with. In our quest to understand what makes an entrepreneur decide to start a sustainable business, we developed an understanding of ' action competence', which can be roughly understood as the ability to take responsibility for sustainable design or redesign of products and services, notwithstanding the possible challenges it brings. I can imagine that we can understand your 'independency' in terms of such an action competence. Again, this is highly speculative at this stage and maybe there are more appropriate competencies to be found in the literature on research competencies, but it might be an avenue to further explore. if you are interested in action competence, please have a look at the attachment. Hope this helps, vincent Blok
independence needs to be scaffolded. Tasks need to be subdivided into sub-tasks that are performed individually. Reflection exercises based on pre-set criteria for each task encourage independence.
The path to becoming a good researcher lies in identifying key issues of the problem and to problematize a phenomenon, a researcher needs to have the ability to read and interpret high-quality texts that would add to her knowledge resource. It is important to ask relevant questions and at the same time have grasp over one's craft like designing a research, producing a questionnaire, conducting pilot study to understand the 'field' and the feasibility of the questionnaire. However, research is not limited to technical knowledge alone therefore, the art of interpretation of data and organizing the data into a coherent whole that adds to the existing body of knowledge are equally important. Training and in-depth knowledge of discipline are twin factors for becoming a good researcher, independent or not!
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Econ
- Innovation Economics
- Innovation