One of the responsibilities outlined in the syllabus for ENVS 220 is to know your questions. Originally, I was confused as to what exactly this meant outside of the context of our concentration, but now I see that it applies to everything we do in this course.
Knowing questions does, however, come in very important for defining our concentrations. The four different kinds of questions for concentrations include: descriptive, explanatory, evaluative, and instrumental. While at first these seemed supplementary to my concentration, I now see that they are the driving forces. The questions directly outline the problem you are looking at. The first two objectively describe the problem and why it is happening while the last two subjectively look at what is good/bad about the problem and what can be done. This is exactly what we’re trying to accomplish with the concentration in becoming experts in the field of our choice. This also means that these questions are huge questions that cannot be answered without an exhaustive look at the many different perspectives that work together in any issue. Being so encompassing makes these questions great for driving our eventual projects relating to our concentrations.
Smart questions play a huge role in our labwork as well. This is mainly through our research and focus questions. Research questions give a framework for what we are studying whereas focus questions define the exact thing that we will be testing for in our labs. This often includes proving a null hypothesis false and suggesting a possible reason why while giving the lab more of a specific focus. This is definitely different from most of the labwork done in my Chemistry classes where most of the research and focus questions are given to us, and we are mostly just in charge of interpreting the data. Defining our own questions allow for a lot more freedom, but there is also a lot more responsibility to know what to test and why. For example, in the Inferential Statistics Lab, our group chose variables based more on what we could find that had a lot of available data rather than on super interesting variables to look at together. This made our maps in the next lab comparing infant mortality to percent forest cover seem a little silly. This is something I am still working on and want to make more clear in future lab reports.
Developing questions is a huge part of ENVS 220, and the way I conduct research has changed as a result. Questions inherently drive research, but that has been made much more apparent in this class. It is also now easy to see that having important and interesting questions is critical for important and interesting research.