The Statement of the Problem:

Staging Your Thesis

Why Writing a Statement of the Problem:

• To present the global and local issues surrounding the topic you will study

• To present evidence of those issues

• To argue for the importance of your study

To build good arguments:

• Make statements and present evidence to support the statement.

• Evidence could be put together from:– A summary of views from other research– A summary of views from public opinion– Statistics showing results on area of interest

A Challenge for You

With a partner, find the statements and the supporting evidence in the following excerpts from the Statement of the Problem of the following research studies:

Example: From Jiménez, García, & Pearson (1985)

“A major challenge confronting educators in the United state is the low academic achievement of cultural minority children even though some gains have been reported (Applebee, Langer, & Mullis, 1987). For many, national surveys of academic achievement paint a portrait of minority students as bundles of problems, leading to the conclusion that they are at-risk for academic failure (So & Chan, 1984; Steinberg, Blinde, & Chan, 1984). This perception has channeled much research energy into an endless quest for debilitating traits. One consequence of this trend is that few observers, either from the education profession or the general public, associate successful reading with language minority students.”

Example: From López-Velásquez & Giraldo de Londoño (in development)

There is an urgent need to increase the native-language reading skills of

school-age Colombian students. The ICFES (Instituto Colombiano para el

Fomento de la Educación Superior), a nation-wide standardized test for

high-school students, shows that Colombian high-school graduates do not

reach high levels of Spanish reading comprehension. The reading results in

2006 show that more than 50% of the 11th grade population scored

“average” and “poor”. A significantly smaller percentage of Colombian high-

school graduates reached high levels of reading comprehension on this test.

The ICFES test results reported that only 0,72% of high-school students

demonstrated comprehension that revealed the students’ capacity to

“generate questions about the content, but also the ‘why’ of the content, its

organization and structure, and about the perspective and views that may

be intertwined in what apparently are only phrases on a text” (ICFES, 2006,

authors’ translation). These results suggest that in Colombia, at the end of

more than a decade of schooling, students are able to decode text and

understand its generalities, but are less able to make sense of text at a level

that encourages the increase of their intellect (Keene, 2008).

Where Can We Find Evidence for the Statement of the Problem?

• Articles (research or conceptual)• Official websites:

– DANE: Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística

http://www.dane.gov.co/

– ICFES: Instituto Colombiano para el Fomento de la Educación Superior

http://web2.icfes.gov.co/

More Places to Search for Evidence 2

– MEN: Ministerio de Educación Nacionalhttp://www.mineducacion.gov.co/1621/channel.html

– National Newspapers:eltiempo.com

elespectador.com

elcolombiano.com

latarde.com

More Places to Search for Evidence 3

• Colombian Professional Associations:www.asocopi.org

www.britichcouncil.org/colombia

• Other Official (reliable) local sources:– Transcript reports (grades)– Program documents– School PEI– MEN Standards– UTP records

IMPORTANT!!!!• Write down the information of your

sources. You’ll need it to build your reference list!!!

– Author Name/last name– Title of newspaper– Name of institution– Title of publication

– Title of journal– Year of publication

– Website URL– Date of retrieval

For Next Class

• Collect 3 pieces of evidence relevant to your research idea from several sources to start building your Statement of the Problem.