Writing Strategies for Rationalize Study Decisions

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Rationalize Study Decisions is used to provide reasoning or explanation throughout your main experimental design. We do this to justify experiment/study-related choices and help establish credibility in the study. This Strategy also helps to connect the experiment/study-related choices and the general research purpose/objectives/research questions. Take this sentence as an example:

a. “Because the current study aimed to investigate learners’ perceptions toward task performance in each unit, we focused on only those four survey items that related to this, three of which are Likert scale and one open-ended.”

To help you recall, elements of rationalizing existed in the previous Goal to rationalize pre-study decisions. Rationalizing can occur when you are discussing data collection or preparation as well. If you made a choice in your study, you will likely need to state or at least think about why that choice was made.

If you made a choice following standard practice, you will find that it is quite common to reference previous work as a form of justifying. As in this example:

b. “For all samples, activity was calculated and reported as described by Author (YEAR). 

A word of caution, however. Just because another study utilized the same procedure or made similar choices does not automatically provide a justification for why you also followed the same practice.

Now, let’s look at another example:

c. “Cognitive abilities were assessed with the Cognitive Abilities Test by Heller and Perleth (2000), as it allows for an estimate of students’ general cognitive abilities independent of their language proficiency.”

We can see from Example c, the rationalizing statement is only part of the final clause, starting with “as it allows for an estimate of…”. This clause is used because the author needs to rationalize why the Cognitive Abilities Test was used (assuming there are other ways of assessing cognition).

Sometimes, we not only have to justify what we did do, but also what we did not do. Take the following example:

d. “English word reading performance was also assessed at age 5 but was excluded from this study because the word list used was different from the one used in subsequent years.”

Here are some additional Language Use examples: