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Start date
19 June 2024
Pre-Congress Workshop Research Methods in Forest Science
End date
22 June 2024
Location
SLU Ultuna Campus, Uppsala, Sweden
Major Sponsors
Key skills to be developed over the course of the workshop:
It lead the participants through the process of asking scientific questions, developing meaningful hypotheses, and designing the research to test these hypotheses. At the end, each participant was to be able to prepare, on a single piece of paper, the important elements of a Gowin Vee for their research, and to share this with the group.
Lead Facilitator:
John Kershaw, University of New Brunswick, Canada;
SPDC has a long history of organising Training Workshops on pertinent subjects relevant to forest scientists in conjunction with large IUFRO conferences and congresses. The IUFRO World Congress 2024 in Sweden represents another ideal opportunity for selected early- and mid-career scientists to enhance essential skills for generating high-quality research results and for communicating such results to policy and practice.
This workshop module presented a framework for preparing a scientific research study plan.
The content included an approach to research study plan preparation that is simple, straight forward, and comprehensive. The sessions sought active student participation, including brief introduction of self and current/recent research topics.
By following the model of the Gowin Vee the focus is on three stages – first, on the real system under study -- everything is a system – with composition, structure, and environment, ending with stated knowns and unknowns about the system. The second stage begins when it is recognized that everything in the system composition has properties that can be represented using constructs – either a concept or a proposition or a theory, ending with a testable statement or claim about nature. The final stage identifies or develops methods of testing the claim about nature. These methods may include data gathering/sampling, working with historical or your own numbers of limited precision, selecting powerful statistical tests, and drawing proper conclusions from tests. The idea is to cover all the ‘bases’ of a research problem on a single sheet of paper, so that understanding and representing the real system and one can demonstrate to someone that you understand: a) the real system, b) how to represent the system conceptually, and c) what techniques are appropriate to test your conjectures.