Results Chapter

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The results chapter basically gives the results of the study including the interpretation. What it doesn't do is give the conclusions from the paper. What is the difference?

• interpretation: "Group A had significantly larger gains than Group B suggesting that the students learned more in that class."
• conclusion: "This type of instruction will help all students and should be used by all schools everywhere."

Organizing the Results

The most important thing for the results is for them to be complete - tell the whole story of what happened. It is tempting to just give the final result because that is what is most interesting to you. But this leaves too much of the details in your head and leaves the reader with lots of questions. Take your time and give the full story.

You can organize your results chronologically, by research question, by case studies or by instrument - it is slightly easier to do it by instrument, but the other methods are appropriate in some cases.

Use chronological organization to talk about the implementation of some new instructional method where you are adapting the method based on daily feedback. In this case the sequence of events and your thinking as a researcher are important.

If you have a number of research questions you may want to address each individually. This can be useful especially with primarily

If you organize your results by instrument, it is often useful to start with the quantitative results and then later give the more qualitative data. This allows you to use the qualitative data to explain the statistical results (e.g. why did so many students not turn in their work? According to Student A...).

Presenting Data

Data is presented in the text as well as in tables, graphs, transcripts and images. You should never have a table that is not also explained in the text. You need to interpret your tables for the reader - even if the interpretations seem obvious. Use of statistical language for interpreting graphs & tables or educational jargon for transcripts is encouraged. Assume that your reader understands things like correlations and slopes etc. Likewise you can use terms like metacognition, feedback, sense making to describe students behavior without explanation.

Statistical Data

A single statistical result can be reported in the text, but if you have several results (e.g. averages for different student groups or different assessments) a table is generally the way to go. Graphs can be useful in some cases where you want to show the magnitude of the different or trends in the data, but often tables are just as effective.

All tables and graphs should have a Caption with a label. Label tables so that you can refer to them in the text - even if the table is on a different page. Label them in an organized way. Typically we use letters or numbers (e.g. Table 1, Table 2) and sometimes refer to the chapter number and the table number within the chapter (Table 2.1, Table 4.3). For graphs use the label "Image" with a number or letter (e.g. Figure 4.2).

The results show (Table 1) that students in the hands-on classes preformed 
significantly better than those in the textbook science classes in only one 
of the long performance assessments.  The differences in the flatworms assessment 
(t(19)=1.19, p<.05) do suggest small advantage for the hands on classes.

In the table above you can see several things about presenting statistical results. The table clearly shows the two categories of students and gives the mean scores with the standard deviation in parentheses. Notice the averages are limited to two decimal places for readability. The number of classes is clearly labeled. If there were different Ns for different assessments I could have put a total N value in the column headings instead of the rows. The asterisk is used to identify significant differences. This must be clearly explained in the caption.

The text refers to the table and describes the key results. It provides the significance test (in this case a t-test) details in the parentheses. Be sure to report the statistical results according to APA Style

Interviews

Interview transcripts should be put into the appendix (not every interview you do, but all the ones that you talk about in the paper).

In the Results Chapter you want to except and interpret the interview. This means that you need to analyze the interviews (as described in the Methods Chapter) and see what they tell you about your research questions. In the results section you want to describe what you have discovered and provide the key evidence for that interpretation.

When asked about a cold object warming to its surrounding (a cold soda 
on a table in a warm room) he focused initially on the visible reaction 
(condensation) and then elaborated:

I:  Imagine that you take a soda out of the refrigerator and put it on the
    table.  but before you could open it, you get a phone call and get 
    distracted.  Then you come back 10 minutes later.  What would happen to 
    the temperature of the soda?
F:  It would get warmer
I:  Sure - we have all seen that.  But why do you think this happens?
F:  [pause] Well, if it is a pretty cold fridge its usually got water or 
    something on it that makes it cold and that would drip off first and 
    then it would probably loose some of its, some of its [pause] 
    temperature…  It also depends on the kind of top I put on...

Frank starts with the observable effect (condensation) but then asserts 
that the soda loses something.  He pauses and eventually calls the thing 
it looses “temperature.”  This type of explanation has been observed in 
other studies to be based on everyday experiences (Clark, 1996; Linn & Hsi, 
in press).  Cold objects are observed to eventually become the same 
temperature of the surround thus loosing their unique temperature.  Frank 
quickly moves away from this idea to the role of having an open top.  His 
language suggests he was not very confident in the role of the temperature, 
but more so on the role of the open top.

In the above excerpt the small piece of interview transcript is selected to demonstrate a students thinking at a particular point in time. Similar interviews later in the unit show some changes in the students thinking. The text below the except provides an interpretation of the students' comments and relates it to literature that had been previously discussed.

Case Studies

In order to present data in case study form you will collect all the data for your specific cases and use that to tell the story of that individual. At the beginning you need to introduce each of the cases and describe how you selected them and how they differ from one another. Then for each case you give the background and the results for that person. Often this is done in chronological order because you are looking at how an individual reacts to different situations and changes over time.

Do not use real names. Create pseudonyms for your cases and note that they are not the real names the first time you mention them.

Summarizing Results

At the end of the Results chapter you want to summarize the most important findings. This will set the stage for your Conclusions Chapter in which you will explain what these finding mean for you, for teachers in general and for the field of education.