As research students engage with the initial stages of the development of their research design, a difficulty that commonly arises is with the selection, description and understanding of the nature and purposes of the theoretical framework. A consequence of this early difficulty for some students is that there are tensions among the proposed framework for the study and the methods of data collection and analysis. In this paper, the use of Gowin’s Vee heuristic (Novak & Gowin, 1984; Gowin & Alvarez, 2005) as a device for helping students to reconcile their conceptual understanding of the research with the methodological approach is presented. The Vee assists students to engage in systematic consideration and explication of each phase of the proposed research, which can make transparent the theoretical framework for the research and its relationship to the research question. This activity enables students to demonstrate how the chosen research methods and the knowledge claims anticipated are consistent with the epistemological stance that underpins the work.

Keywords: research education, Vee heuristic, higher degree research.