Q: Why do undergraduates flounder at generating research ideas?
A: Productive curiosity is a skill that needs to be taught. My first Twitter thread! (1/11)
#PsychTwitter #AcademicChatter #AcademicTwitter #ScienceTwitter

Learning how to ask scientific questions requires familiarity with the types of questions that science is best-suited to answer. “Be curious!” and “Ask questions!” is easy for you to say, because you’re already a nerd who self-selected into an inquisitive profession. (2/11)

When we fail to instruct how to ask good questions, in their place we get speculative hunches, boring generalizations, or blank stares. Enter question coaching: you provide the structured starting questions that mimic how scientists think. (3/11)

Each of the following questions maps on to a principle used in scientific reasoning. They force assumptions out in the open in a way that makes them easy to interrogate. (4/11)

1. How many different ways can we classify this?
2. What's normal and typical? How do you know?
3. What's abnormal and extreme? How do you know?
4. Are there parallels with other phenomena? In what meaningful ways are they similar?
5. What makes this phenomenon unique? (5/11)

6. What are the causes and consequences of this phenomenon?
7. What is the role of context, drives, and constraints? (Some useful examples here include time, environment, resources, and motivations.)
(6/11)

What to do: Have your students pick a topic of interest, select two of these questions, and write down everything they think they know BEFORE consulting any literature. Only then have them read and report back on what they found, identifying hits and misses. (7/11)

What makes these narrow, focused questions so powerful? They get students to externalize assumptions without requiring them to know they’re assumptions ahead of time. Curiosity hinges on this. It relies on you noticing where your understanding of the world is deficient. (8/11)

But students are novices: they don’t know how much they don’t know, especially in psychology. The crucial part of this exercise is that students face evidence that they don’t perfectly understand something they thought they did. Even better, it's in a researchable format. (9/11)

Question coaching also eliminates the confusion between a hypothesis-as-prediction (If I do X, then Y will happen) and hypothesis-as-claim (If A is really how the world works, then B will be the outcome when I perform a test). (10/11)

The latter is the appropriate starting point for an investigation, and it’s the logic that guides study design. However, the “prediction” idea is so central that students often jump to the testing phase if they aren’t guided by structure.

And that's all, folks! (11/11)