Cultural Inquiry Process Steps: Conducting Your Own CIP Study

This page describes the CIP Guidebook on this Web site and discusses how to use it to support conducting your own CIP study. This page also provides some general guidance about the role of writing in your CIP study.

As you read these pages, you may want to use the links provided to read the items they describe. If you do follow a link, please remember to return to these introductory pages and finish reading both of them before starting your own CIP study.

Using the CIP Guidebook

The CIP Guidebook has three major components: CIP Steps, CIP Studies, and Success Stories. They are part of the sidebar menu on the left side of all pages in this Web site. The Guidebook also has a Glossary and Reference List. For a complete list of all the pages in the Guidebook refer to the Guidebook section in the Site Map.

This page is part of the introduction to the CIP Steps section of the Guidebook. The CIP Steps section is the “heart” of the Guidebook. To provide a "scaffold" for conducting your CIP study the Guidebook discusses each CIP Step in detail, presents relevant information, and provides a gateway to other useful information. Each page of the CIP Steps section also links to pertinent CIP Studies (examples of CIP studies written by educators) and Success Stories (summaries of research that document positive outcomes of addressing cultural influences on education).

The rest of this section outlines what to read in the CIP Guidebook for each CIP step in order to make best use of it as a "scaffold." You may find it helpful to print the expanded diagram of the CIP and follow along with the diagram as you read the text in this section.

There is one Web page for Step 1 (Identify puzzlement) and one for Step 2 (Summarize known information). You should read these pages before you work on these steps.

For Step 3 (Consider cultural influences), Step 4 (Gather and analyze information), and Step 5 (Develop and implement interventions) there is a main page for each step and also a page for each substep. The substeps for Steps 3, 4, and 5 present parallel information across those three steps for the various cultural influences discussed.

When you begin Step 3 you should read the main Step 3 page and all the pages for its substeps. The "Consider next question" links at the bottom of each page are provided to take you to the next substep in Step 3. (Open the Layout of a CIP Steps page and note the "Process Links" identified at the bottom of the diagram.) As you read the Step 3 pages, carefully consider whether the various cultural influences discussed might be relevant to understanding your puzzlement.

When you begin Step 4 and Step 5, you only need to read the general pages for those steps and the pages directly related to the CIP question(s) you are considering. For example, if you decide to use CIP question 3.2.2 (How might tracking or ability grouping be contributing to the puzzling situation?) to examine your puzzlement, then you would read the main Step 4 page, the Step 4.2 page and the Step 4.2.2 page. If after you complete Step 4, you decide that tracking and ability grouping do influence your puzzlement, you would read the main Step 5 page, then the Step 5.2 page and the Step 5.2.2 page. One of the Process Links at the bottom of these pages will open the Guide for Reading Step 4 and Step 5 Pages, which will help you follow the appropriate path through these pages in the CIP Guidebook.

For concrete examples of how educators have used the CIP Guidebook, refer to the CIP studies by Zink and by Schiavo and review the diagram for Zink's Study and the diagram for Schiavo's Study. These PDF diagrams illustrate the pages each educator used in the CIP Guidebook in order to perform his or her study.

Writing as part of your CIP study

Writing can play several important roles in your CIP study. Writing during the CIP study can be a very useful tool for thinking about various aspects of your study; writing a final report at the end of your study allows you and others to benefit from your work in the future.

During your CIP study you might write memos and you might draft sections of your final report. Memos involve getting ideas down on paper to record them and to facilitate reflection and analysis. Because writing is a form of thinking, the process of writing memos often will lead you to new insights. Memos can be short or long. They can be written solely for yourself or they can be used to get feedback from others on your thinking. Memos can be written at any time during your study, and are especially useful during analysis. See Maxwell (1996, pp. 12-13) for a general discussion of memos. To facilitate retrieval of your memos, I suggest that you give each memo a title, that you date it, and that you file all your memos in a folder. This collection of memos becomes a record of your thinking during your CIP study.

Drafting sections of your report as you move through the CIP has several benefits. First, the written text can help improve the quality of your study by facilitating your own thinking and by assisting you in getting feedback from your peers and instructor. Second, drafting sections along the way will make writing the final report much easier. Each CIP step provides suggestions for writing draft sections of your report.

A written report of your CIP study might be useful to you by allowing you to reflect on your work and build on it in the future. It also might be useful in advocating for change in your educational setting. In addition, a report will help others benefit from your work. For example, many have found the CIP studies written by other educators to be helpful as they conduct their own CIP study. For general discussions of writing reports of action research studies, see Hubbard and Powers (2003, pp. 144-167) and Mills (2003, pp. 162-187).

Suggestions for writing memos and for drafting sections of your report are provided at the end of the pages for CIP Steps 1-6. Step 7 discusses how to work with the drafts at the end of your study to produce your final report.

A general note about writing

A central goal of your study is to understand the cultural influences on your puzzlement. Because this probably will involve learning about cultural attitudes, values and behavior patterns different from your own, it is important to take a "learner's stance" toward the information you collect and analyze. This includes not making judgments about what you learn and not letting judgmental language (for example, terms like "good," "bad," or "problem") casually slip into your writing. Thus, you should generally use neutral language (language without implicit or explicit judgments) in your writing--from observation notes to analytic memos to final report. This is one reason why the CIP refers to "puzzlements" rather than "problems."

One exception to this guideline is when you are writing memos to explicitly explore your personal responses to what you are learning in your study. Such memos can help you bring feelings or judgments to the surface, where they can more easily be "seen." When you can explicitly acknowledge your feelings and responses, you can more easily monitor them and minimize their impact on your data collection, data analysis, and writing. I suggest that you label such memos as "personal responses" to distinguish them from memos focused on what your are learning about your puzzlement.

Other uses of the CIP Web site and CIP Guidebook

Although I developed the CIP Web site and the CIP Guidebook to help educators use it to address and understand their puzzlements by conducting CIP Studies that use the CIP seven-step action research approach, the information presented can be used in other ways. For example, Step 3 (Consider alternative cultural influences) could be used by itself, or as part of the larger CIP Guidebook, in a course or in school districts to consider possible cultural influences on students in the special education prereferral process (see, “Using the CIP as a Tool in the Special Education Prereferral Process,” by Mittie Quinn). Alternatively, Anastasi (2004) showed how the information in CIP Step 3 might be used without a specific puzzlement to explore cultural influences on a classroom (open abbreviated version of the research paper in PDF format or abbreviated version formatted for accessibility in PDF).

This completes your introduction to the Cultural Inquiry Process. You are ready to use the pages detailing each step in order to "scaffold" your own CIP study. Start by reading Step 1: Select as your focus one or more students and identify your puzzlement(s) about the student(s).