Positioning Statement and Formative Annotations for Assessment
What is a Contextual Review?
When you write a contextual review you are not describing your making process (that is research methods) you are asking yourself a series of questions:
The questions you are asking yourself are:
- Why am I interested in this topic or research area?
- What am I going to contribute to this area of research or topic that is new
? How do I prove someone else hasn’t already come up with this idea?
To find out you will also need to ask…
- Who else is, or has been researching /working on this topic or area of research?
- Who else is, or has been researching /working on this topic or area of research?
- What did they do specifically to carry out their research? (methods?)
- What did they/someone say about their research/ideas? Can you find a secondary source?
- What did they discover?
- Where can I look to find out about what they did? (in academic journals, books, videos, films, talk to people, read blogs and websites, exhibitions etc..
- Did they say anything useful that will help me to determine if my ideas are worth researching?
- Or do I need to adapt and change my ideas because I’ve discovered they’ve already thought the same thing as me?
- What can I learn from their research?
And then I will write about what I discovered about who is working on the same research topic/area, what ideas influenced them, how is my research different to theirs whilst also being related to theirs, what ideas influenced me – did they influence me, did I disagree with them?