Expertise and deep knowledge is something students definitionally lack. Any hypothesis on ritual, for example, is something I could give a pretty good and hopefully accurate intuition on, even in the absence of a direct literature on the topic.
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But a student who has generated an 'hypothesis' without a decade of wide and deep reading is... just testing their own biases (implicit, explicit, cognitive, social, whatever). It's epistemically less valuable and valid than more grounded hypotheses based in transparent and rigorous documentation.
This lead to a project where the 'hypothesis' was: Compared to non-Muslims, adolescent Muslims have better grades in school (because their faith encourages frequent textual study). Observation. Sure. Obviously wrong though.
Rather than building up from literature (say, "does frequency of reading generalize to understanding across domains", or something similar), they assumed that *Islamic practices* were core to the hypothesis, because it was core to their observation.
They proposed a causal relationship (Islamic Doctrine -> better students). If their observation had been, something like, "I've noticed Islamic students outperform their non-Islamic peers on standardized tests"... such an observation, especially without an implied causality, is open for exploration.
First, test if observation is valid (Is X > Y?). If valid (and robustly so), then proceed, to determining what might predict it.
Maybe there's something geniunely in the observation. But there are steps we ought to take (and teach) for an observation of the real-world to be considered ...
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I've had supervision students who are attracted to my research because they have personal religious convictions.
And wrong because the observation was biased.
Maybe there's something geniunely in the observation. But there are steps we ought to take (and teach) for an observation of the real-world to be considered ...