Segment 4: Interrogate & Confirm

Confer with discipline advisors to revise lists of concepts and terminology obtained from abstracts. Compile discipline lists into one master list.

Prior to undertaking these tasks, step back and review the terms your reading of retrieved abstracts has produced and decide if you need to add additional resource people to your interdisciplinary group. If your inquiry so far has pointed you knowledge or practice domains beyond the few you originally began with, consider recruiting people with experience and expertise in the newly discerned areas. This is a good time to consider additional benefits of creating a participatory, interdisciplinary group. These points are from On Purpose Associates.

• Learning is fundamentally a social phenomenon. People organize their learning around the social communities of which they are members.
  
• Knowledge is inseparable from practice. It is not possible to "know" without "doing". By doing, we learn.
  
• Circumstances where we are engaged in real action that has consequences for both us and the community of which we are a part create the most powerful learning environments.

For each discipline or field, take to your resource people your list of terms found in the abstracts of literature which seem significant to the concept you're interested in. Have each resource person review the list of terms from the literature of his or her field and discuss with you what changes to make in the set. Discard terms which arenšt really on target relative to your subject. Ask your resource people how terms are understood in that person's area of expertise. (Of course you also do this yourself in your own area of proficiency.)

When you and your colleagues have finished refining the lists of terms for each field or discipline, compile the individual sets of terms into one master list. You may want to note for each term which knowledge domains utilize it.