RES 6512 Module 2 Purpose Statement and Research Questions Example

From Concern to Testable Questions: Purpose Statement, Research Questions and Hypotheses for a Quasi-Experimental Study of Structured Debriefing

Student Name

American College of Education

RES6512: Research Concept Paper

Module 2 Assignment

Instructor Name

October 19, 2026

Introduction

Module 1 established the problem: debriefing after simulation in our associate degree program follows no consistent, theory-based method, and no one knows whether a structured approach would change students' clinical judgment. A problem statement says what is wrong. A purpose statement says what the study will do about it, and research questions say exactly what will be asked of the data. This paper drafts and revises the purpose statement, writes the research questions and their hypotheses, defines the terms they use and tests whether the questions can be answered by the design the alignment table proposed.

What the Purpose Statement Has to Carry

For a quantitative study, a purpose statement usually names the design, the variables and how they relate, the participants and the setting, and it uses language that signals the intent, such as compare or examine the relationship (Creswell & Creswell, 2018). It should also mirror the problem so plainly that a reader sees the purpose answering it. The statement is short, often a single sentence, but every phrase in it commits the study to something. If it promises an exploration, the reader expects qualitative data; if it names a variable, the reader expects that variable to be measured.

Two Drafts and a Revision

My first draft read: "The purpose of this study is to explore how debriefing affects nursing students' learning in simulation." It fails on most counts. Explore suggests a qualitative approach, debriefing is unspecified, learning is too broad to measure and no setting or comparison is named.

The second draft narrowed the terms: "This quantitative study will determine whether Debriefing for Meaningful Learning improves clinical judgment in associate degree nursing students." This was better, but improves implies a causal claim that a nonequivalent groups design can only partly support, and the comparison condition is missing.

The final version reads: "The purpose of this quantitative, quasi-experimental study is to compare the clinical judgment scores, measured with the Lasater Clinical Judgment Rubric, of second-year students in an Arizona community college's associate degree nursing program, which runs on two campuses, who receive Debriefing for Meaningful Learning with those of students who receive the program's usual debriefing, controlling for an early-semester baseline score." It names the design, the intervention and its comparison, the outcome and its instrument, the participants, the setting and the covariate.

Variables

The independent variable is debriefing condition, with two levels. Students in the intervention semester will be debriefed with Debriefing for Meaningful Learning, a method grounded in reflective learning in which the facilitator guides students through cycles of engaging, exploring, explaining, elaborating, evaluating and extending their thinking about a scenario (Dreifuerst, 2012). Students in the comparison semester will receive the debriefing their instructors already use. The dependent variable is clinical judgment, operationalized as the total score on the Lasater Clinical Judgment Rubric for a standardized end-of-semester scenario, rated from video by trained raters. The rubric's four dimension scores serve as secondary outcomes. The covariate is each student's total rubric score on an early-semester scenario, included because the groups are not randomly assigned and may start at different levels.

Research Questions and Hypotheses

RQ1: After controlling for early-semester clinical judgment, is there a difference in end-of-semester total Lasater Clinical Judgment Rubric scores between students who receive Debriefing for Meaningful Learning and students who receive usual debriefing?

H01: After controlling for the baseline score, there is no difference in adjusted mean total rubric scores between the two debriefing conditions. Ha1: After controlling for the baseline score, adjusted mean total rubric scores differ between the two conditions.

RQ2: After controlling for the corresponding baseline dimension score, is there a difference between the two debriefing conditions in end-of-semester scores on each of the rubric's four dimensions: noticing, interpreting, responding and reflecting?

H02a through H02d: For each dimension, there is no difference in adjusted mean scores between the conditions. Ha2a through Ha2d: For each dimension, adjusted mean scores differ. Because RQ2 involves four tests, each will be judged against a Bonferroni-adjusted significance level of .0125, which holds the familywise risk of a spurious finding across the four tests close to .05.

Why Two-Tailed

The alternative hypotheses are nondirectional even though earlier studies favored structured debriefing (Dreifuerst, 2012; Forneris et al., 2015). Those studies measured reasoning with a written test, not performance rated against a rubric, and they were not set in associate degree programs like ours. It is possible that a longer, more demanding debriefing reduces the time available for practice and leaves performance unchanged, or that faculty new to the method use it unevenly at first. A directional hypothesis would claim more than the evidence supports, so the study will test for a difference in either direction.

Operational Definitions

Clinical judgment: the interpretation of a patient's needs and the decision to act, or not, along with improvisation in response to the patient (Tanner, 2006), measured here by rubric scores. Lasater Clinical Judgment Rubric: an observational rubric with 11 indicators grouped into the four dimensions of Tanner's model, each placed at the beginning, developing, accomplished or exemplary level (Lasater, 2007). Usual debriefing: whatever post-scenario discussion the assigned instructor normally conducts, documented by a brief checklist so that its content can be described. Second-year student: a student enrolled in the program's third- or fourth-semester medical-surgical course.

What the Questions Leave Out

The questions deliberately omit three things the program cares about. They do not ask how students experience the two methods, which would require interviews and a different design. They do not ask about licensure examination results, which arrive months later and depend on many influences besides debriefing. And they do not ask about faculty, whose preparation and fidelity to the method will be documented but not analyzed as outcomes. Each omission keeps the study small enough to finish while leaving clear follow-up questions for later work.

Checking the Questions Against the Design

Each question was tested against three checks before it was kept. The first was whether the design can produce the data the question needs. Both questions compare adjusted group means, which analysis of covariance provides, and both rely on rubric scores that raters can produce from video without knowing a student's group. The second was whether the question could be answered with a yes or a no alone; a question that invites only a yes tends to hide the size of the effect, so the analysis will report adjusted means, confidence intervals and partial eta squared alongside each test. The third was whether the question stays within the problem. A draft third question about faculty satisfaction with the method was cut at this stage: it is interesting, but it does not address students' clinical judgment and would have required a separate instrument and a separate sample.

Conclusion

The purpose statement now commits the study to a comparison, an instrument, a population and a covariate, and the research questions follow directly from it. Each question has a pair of hypotheses that the planned analysis can test, a plan for multiple comparisons and terms pinned down tightly enough for a second team to reproduce the measurement. Module 3 turns to the theoretical framework that explains why structured debriefing should influence clinical judgment in the first place.

References

Creswell, J. W., & Creswell, J. D. (2018). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (5th ed.). SAGE Publications.

Dreifuerst, K. T. (2012). Using debriefing for meaningful learning to foster development of clinical reasoning in simulation. Journal of Nursing Education, 51(6), 326-333. https://doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20120409-02

Forneris, S. G., Neal, D. O., Tiffany, J., Kuehn, M. B., Meyer, H. M., Blazovich, L. M., Holland, A. E., & Smerillo, M. (2015). Enhancing clinical reasoning through simulation debriefing: A multisite study. Nursing Education Perspectives, 36(5), 304-310. https://doi.org/10.5480/15-1672

Lasater, K. (2007). Clinical judgment development: Using simulation to create an assessment rubric. Journal of Nursing Education, 46(11), 496-503. https://doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20071101-04

Tanner, C. A. (2006). Thinking like a nurse: A research-based model of clinical judgment in nursing. Journal of Nursing Education, 45(6), 204-211. https://doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20060601-04