Conclusions Chapter
From Eduwiki
The conclusion (sometimes called Discussion) is your chance to tie together all the ideas in your thesis.
Contents |
Review Purpose
You want to revisit the themes from all the first three chapters:
- chapter 1: what is the problem, question, or need you are trying to address?
- chapter 2: what does the literature say about this issue?
- chapter 3: what methods did you use to address
You start off the conclusion by summarizing these ideas briefly (to remind the reader of the purpose)
Findings and Implications
Now you are ready to talk about your results and what they mean. You should address all your key findings (you can ignore anything that is not significant or not interesting). Remind the reader what the finding is (don't repeat figures, just refer to them). Then say something about what this finding implies. Here are some suggestions:
- What does this finding suggest about how to teach this topic/grade/population?
- What does this result tell you about how schools are organized and run?
- What does this finding say about our understanding of students and learning?
- What further research does this finding point to?
- How does this study add to what we know about doing educational research? (advances in methods)
You have a good deal of leeway as to what you conclude from your results - but they do need to be reasonable. Also you should not go off onto a tangent beyond what your research was about (avoid making conclusions about the study you wish you had done).
You should feel free here to make brief recommendations for changes in curriculum/administration/students/parents but again, try not to get carried away.
Limitations of the Study
No study is ever perfect. A sign of a true research is the ability to see and articulate the limits of their own research.
Action research is almost always limited by a narrow sample (usually from one or two classes). Because of this there is usually a question about how these results would generalize to different classes, different schools, and different ages.
There are also questions about the assessments used - did they really measure what we want them to? And the treatment (if there was a treatment) - was it a good test of the idea?
Also this is the time to talk about things that went wrong (or different than expected) in the study.
End
You don't want to end your paper on a down note (e.g. limitations) so it is good to have a short section at the end that talks about something for the future. You should feel free here to make brief recommendations for changes in curriculum/administration/students/parents but again, stay on the point of your paper.
