Abstract

Scholars in education and learning often hold a promising idea for a conceptual paper without knowing what it is missing. This paper proposes a diagnostic approach to theory development. Rather than prescribing a fixed sequence of steps, it names four common stuck points: having a topic but no question, having a question but no account of why the answer holds, having an argument but no form, and having a theory but no way to present it. Each is paired with a diagnostic question, a tool taken from existing work on theory development (Makadok, Burton, & Barney, 2018; Cornelissen, 2017; Lange & Pfarrer, 2017; Barney, 2018), and a test for whether the problem has been resolved. Two constructed examples from education show the approach at work, and a short mentoring protocol shows how seminar leaders and supervisors might adopt it. The paper is a conceptual synthesis that has not been tested empirically. Where Thatcher and Fisher (2022) provide step-by-step worksheets organized by manuscript element, this paper provides a diagnostic framework organized by the problem the author is stuck on, written specifically for education and learning scholars; it is meant to sit alongside their exercises, not to replace them.

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