Research-based thinking plays an important role when facing everyday life challenges in many ways. It provides new perspectives and understanding of problems and helps direct focus on essential questions. Research-based thinking over rides traditional thinking habits and gives new tools for thinking. Research-based thinking also leads interest into new areas and helps to create new concepts seeing the world differently.

Active learning and developing

Research-based thinking differs from everyday thinking, but they should not be set against each other. I always think that practice is the best theory and vice versa. This I base on the well-known American educational reformer John Dewey who is famous for the concept ‘learning by doing’. It means that education should be active and based on real life experiences (Rinne, Kivirauma & Lehtinen 2015).

Maybe we hear some echoes of Dewey´s thinking in the vocational teacher training at Haaga-Helia, where studies are implemented in accordance with the enquiry-based development model. The model contains the following stages of development: the investigation of the current state of affairs, goal setting, the investigation of theoretical assumptions, experimentation, and sharing of findings. (Haaga-Helia 2024a.)

From research-based thinking to doing research

Basically, there are five steps for research: choosing the subject, gathering and analyzing data, writing results and publishing the results for example in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Basic principles of good scientific practice, known as academic integrity, is based on reliability, honesty, valuation and responsibility. Reliability is about ensuring the quality of scientific activity in design, methods and analysis. Honesty is about reporting scientific activities openly, fairly and impartially. Valuation is about appreciation for colleagues and those involved in scientific activities. Responsibility is present in the entire cycle of a scientific process which starts from an idea and ends at publishing one´s research. (Finnish National Board on Research Integrity TENK 2023.)

Artificial intelligence in research

Generative AI is already capable of making up new hypotheses and insights from big data. Maybe in the future AI can create research independently. Should we give access to AI for every scientific information? It is said that knowledge is power. How do we secure that companies behind generative AI use ethically scientific data given to them? It is also a matter of data protection, copyrights and the voice of individual researchers as well.

Somewhere between are the AI based tools made for students, teachers and researchers for searching research publications. Haaga-Helia has gathered a useful list for tools based on keyword search (for example Semantic Scholar) or visual tools (for example ResearchRabbit ) (Haaga-Helia 2024b).

Technology seems to invade everything. However, I think research-based thinking in everyday life is something that AI can’t replace for a very long time. How about you?

Picture: Shutterstock