SP14 - Dossier #2 Review Presentation [Reflection]

A few questions in the question list generated from last dossier presentation were asked by the reviewers again this time. The highlighted questions can be the most frequently asked and most important questions in dossier #2.

Questions

1. In your focused research area, who are the authors you're drawing from?
2. Why is your research/teaching/service related to our field?
     How did your teaching and service transfer to your research focus?)
3. How do you characterize yourself as a researcher?
4. So what? Why is it important? Why should others be interested to your topic?
5. How do the authors you cited influence in your research and teaching?
6. Are you trying to generalized your findings?
7. Can you talk more about your data collection and data analysis?
8. Can you give us examples from your teaching, service, and/or research experiences to support
what you said?
9. How do you define ____?
10. How is your minor sharing your research studies?
11. How did your literature review inform or support your research studies? What are your takeaways?


Reflection

This was my third time in the dossier #2 review presentation. I realized that what reviewers care about is not only how much I've done in research, teaching, and service, but more importantly, how I integrate what I've done into my main research focus and my professional goals. I think it would be a lot easier for IST doctoral students to meet this requirement if we started thinking about our big questions at the very early stage and then develop those three areas all related to the main focus. Even if we worked on some expanded topics, it would be necessary show how those work could support us to shape our understanding or competencies in the main area. Also, showing the reviewers that I have narrowed down and worked towards the focused research area is important. I believe it's a good opportunity to examine my process and involvement in the three areas when developing my first dossier.

In the presentation this time, reviewers asked the questions like "why do you think ___ is the solution of ___?" "how do you know ___ makes ____ effective?" "Are you trying to generalize your research results?"Therefore, I think it's important to be careful and mindful when I make statements in the research study section in the dossier #2 presentation. Also, always have clear rationale for the importance of a research study and critical thoughts about the process of doing a research. Some fundamental concepts in a research study need to be addressed in the presentation as well.

I found that a good use of images, tables, and graphs in PowerPoint slides provides audience the gist of key concepts in my focus area and a big picture of what I've been doing and perhaps what I'm going to do next, especially when there's a limit of slides. Some bullet points might help, too. However, sometimes reviewers commented that there was not enough information about the context of a research study, the research design, and the process of data collection and data analysis. So, I'm a bit confused how much information I should provide on the presentation slides in order to give enough information for audience. It looks like all the sections required in presentation slides are important. If we needed to be concise or take out some information from my slides, which parts we could first consider?