I have a thesis title 🙂 ‘The construction of shared knowledge through asynchronous dialogue’.
And I’m giving notice of intention to submit. Yay!
23 January – that’s my submission date.
Just watched a Ted Talk by David S Rose on producing a business pitch. Thought I could apply it to writing my thesis introduction.
So the intro should start like a rocket, grabbing readers’ attention, and then it should take a solid, steady upward path.
Start with a title, and then an attention-grabbing introduction. Give a quick overview of the thesis. Like the picture on a jigsaw box, this should help people make sense of the elements to come.
Explain how this is interesting to lots of people – in my case that is how is this interesting to educational researchers and educational practitioners. Give an example. Show how this work can be taken forward and who would be interested in taking it forward.
Then validate it in terms of others, so fit it into the literature and what others have done. Reference things that the audience can relate to. This provides validation becuase the audience sees that things they have already accepted as reliable tie in with what you are saying. Explain what the competition is and why your work is special.
Then move to the conclusion, which is interesting and exciting.
Along the way: don’t include anything that isn’t true, don’t interrupt your audience’s flow by including anything they don’t understand, don’t have any internal inconsistencies and don’t include typos, error or stupid mistakes.
Sometimes citations drive me crazy. I’m just correcting one
Plato, & Emlyn-Hughes, C. (Eds.). (2005). Early Socratic Dialogues. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Eagle-eyed readers will spot several things wrong with this citation, as my supervisors did. You may have noticed that Emlyn Hughes was probably an unlikely editor of classical philosophy. However, that example of my mind wandering aside, it still doesn’t look good.
First, there’s the way that EndNote won’t allow me an author to an edited book. So either Plato becomes an editor, or Chris Emlyn-Jones (as he is more accurately styled) becomes an author. The other option is that I remember to correct this manually at the last minute, without giving EndNote a chance to change it.
And then there’s the date. The implication that Plato wrote up the early Socratic dialogues in 2005 is clearly crazy. On the other hand, (2005 / c300BCE) also looks completely wrong. 2005 is probably the accepted way of doing this sort of citation. But I’m not really citing the individual edition; I’m connecting asynchronous dialogue to a long tradition of educational dialogue, which doesn’t work if I only go back three years.
And don’t even start me on the subject of citing and dating Vygotsky…
I’m thinking about the conclusion to my PhD, so I’ve returned to the literature on what examiners are looking for. Stephen Potter’s book ‘Doing Postgraduate Research’ contains a list of potential viva questions, so I’m going to think about how I could answer those, and then see which elements of my answers will fit comfortably within my conclusion. I’ve included the questions below, ordered according to the section of the thesis I feel they are focused on.
Some of the questions are easy to answer, but some are tricky. I’ll have to give some thought to the issue of how I have evaluated my research. Hmm.
Abstract
What have you done that merits a PhD?
In one sentence, what is your thesis?
What is your original contribution to knowledge in your subject area?
What are the main achievements of your research?
Intro
Why were you interested in this research topic?
Literature review
What are the main issues and debates in this subject area? How does your research relate to these?
Which are the three most important papers which relate to your thesis?
Who has had the strongest influence in the development of your subject area in theory and practice?
What published work is closest to what you have done? How is your work different?
What are the most recent major developments in your area?
Methodology
What were the crucial research decisions you made?
Why did you use the particular research methodology in your thesis?
What are the alternatives to the approach or method you used?
What did you gain by the approach or method you used?
What would you have gained by using another approach?
Were there any ethical implications relating to your research? How did you deal with them?
What would you do differently if you could do your thesis again?
How have you evaluated your work?
How do you know that your findings are correct?
Analysis
Summarise your key findings. What was the most interesting to you?
How do your findings relate to the literature on the subject?
Conclusion
Whom do you think would be most interested in your work?
Have you thought about publications? Which journals are appropriate?
How long-term is your contribution?
What do you see as the next steps in this research?
If you were given money tomorrow to continue your research, what would you do?
Personal summary
What advice would you give to a new research student entering this topic area?
Has your view of your research topic changed during the course of the research?
What have you learnt from your research experience?
Potter, S., & Swift, J. (2006). The examination process and the viva. In S. Potter (Ed.), Doing Postgraduate Research (Second ed., pp. 251-275): The Open University / Sage Publications Ltd
Now that I’m planning out the final (well, hopefully final) version of my analysis chapters, I’m going back over all my notes and checking I haven’t msised anything out. I’m now square-eyed through checking out my last three years of blog entries. Phew.
I think I need to take a break before I start going back over the minutes of my last 60 supervision meetings!
It sounds boring – but it’s very helfpul, because it provides me an overview of the past three years – of where I got ideas from, of the ideas I’d forgotten, and of the ideas that make more sense as I return to them from a different perspective.
And, following on from my last post, the course has ten learning outcomes listed in the Studay and Assessment Guide. One of these is:
‘Work with others to carry out the stages of drafting research proposals, data collection, analysis and interpretation.’
Students are told:
‘You cannot pass this course unless you submit a project proposal to the ethics panel’.
This is also mentioned in the Senior Tutor Notes (2006)
‘students will fail the course if they don’t jointly submit the prpject proposal form.’
Every so often, I investigate which aspects of group work the students on the course I am studying need to experience in order to get BPS accreditation. Having spent some time looking this information up, I always lose it again – so here it is, stored safely.
The QAA Subject Benchmark Statement for Psychology lists ten generic skills. It can be found at
http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/benchmark/statements/Psychology07.pdf
Generic skills
5.5 On graduating with an honours degree in psychology, students should be able to:
● engage in effective teamwork
● be sensitive to contextual and interpersonal factors. The complexity of the factors that shape behaviour and social interaction will be familiar to psychology graduates and will make them more aware of the basis of problems and interpersonal conflict. They should also be more sensitive to the importance of enhancing cooperation to maximise the effectiveness of individual skills as shown in group work and team-building.
In September 2008, the BPS published ‘Quality Assurance Policies and Practice for First Qualifications in Psychology’.
http://www.bps.org.uk/downloadfile.cfm?file_uuid=DB57A883-1143-DFD0-7ECF-67BFDD0107AC&ext=pdf
This specifies that
‘The empirical practical component will normally involve the completion of a psychology project at Honours level. Exceptionally, other equivalent forms of empirical practical work in psychology may also be deemed appropriate, if delivered at Honours level (as defined by the Framework for Higher Education Qualifications, or equivalent frameworks). The project (or equivalent) must be passed and cannot be condoned/compensated. […] it must be demonstrated that students complete independent practical work at H level which includes:
● where appropriate, collaborating effectively with colleagues, participants and outside agencies.’
‘All students must be advised that, in order to be eligible for the GBR, they are required to successfully complete the empirical psychology project, or the equivalent practical components of the programme.’
‘collaboration should be recognised as a state of social engagement that, on any given occasion, is more or less active and more or less effectively resourced. So, collaborators may vary in their concern to create shared understandings; and their circumstances of joint activity may vary in how readily they permit such achievements to be brought off. The challenge is to discover how discourse is mobilised in the service of creating joint reference; to see how what is created gets used as a platform for futher exploration; and to see how the material conditions of problem-solving can be more or less friendly towards efforts after this mutuality.’
Crook, C. (1994). Computers and the collaborative experience of learning. London: Routledge. Page 225.
The next section of my thesis deals with ‘improvable objects’, an idea introduced in Wells’ book ‘Dialogic Inquiry’. Wells credits the idea to Bereiter and Scardamalia in 1996
‘This focus on an “improvable object,” as Bereiter and Scardmalia (1996) term it[…]’
so I go and read their chapter.
Can’t find the term. Well, Scardamalia is spelled wrong in the reference, so maybe the date’s wrong. If it’s a term introduced by Bereiter, maybe he reuses it in his later book (2002). Nope. Maybe it’s in Bereiter and Scardamalia’s earlier book? Nope. Maybe it’s in one of their earlier articles? Nope.
So, naturally, I google it. And find that this blog is number one hit for “improvable object”. So not much help t/here. Lots of people cite Wells 1999 and Bereiter and Scardamalia 1996. Maybe I missed it? Then I find the 2002 book in Google books. It definitely doesn’t mention improvable objects. Finally I track down a downloadable PDF of the 1996 chapter and do a word search. No improvable objects, but only ‘improvable human constructions’ – in this case, mathematical ideas. I can see a strong connection between the two phrases, but they’re not the same.
I must have wasted about four hours on this. The original mis-phrasing of the reference was compounded by subsequent writers not bothering to check. Grrrr.
