Phd thesis discussion conclusions

Phd thesis discussion conclusions

The dissertation conclusion is the final chapter of the thesis, wrapping up the research conducted and summarizing the key outcomes of a discussion section. How To Write A Dissertation Conclusion Answer the research questions of the study. These are solutions to the questions that you brought forward in the first chapter of the dissertation Apr 19,  · September 24, The discussion chapter is the problem child of the thesis. The chapter most likely to provoke fear, uncertainty and doubt. Not everyone writes a chapter called “discussion”, but everyone has to do discussiony bits because, well – that’s where the creative magic of the PhD happens. The discussion section is scary because you have to make new knowledge claims Estimated Reading Time: 7 mins Conclusion This paper has indicated that the generic structure of the Conclusion chapter of a PhD thesis differs qualitatively from the final part of a Discussion section in a research article or masters dissertation, displaying a wider range of moves and steps Concluding chapters showed some disciplinary variation between science and technology disciplines and those in the humanities and social blogger.comted Reading Time: 10 mins

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To browse Academia. edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds phd thesis discussion conclusions upgrade your browser. Skip to main content. edu no longer supports Internet Explorer. Log In Sign Up. Download Free PDF. The structure of PhD conclusion chapters Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Nasrin Nejad.

Download PDF. Download Full PDF Package This paper. A short summary of phd thesis discussion conclusions paper. READ PAPER. The structure of PhD conclusion chapters.

Journal of English for Academic Phd thesis discussion conclusions 4 — www. From a corpus of 45 PhD theses covering a range of disciplines, chapters playing a concluding role were identified and analysed for their functional moves and steps. Most Conclusions were found to restate purpose, consolidate research space with a varied array of steps, recommend future research and cover practical applications, implications or recommendations.

However a minority were found to focus more on the field than on the thesis itself. These field-oriented Conclusions tended to adopt a problem—solution text structure, or in one case, an argument structure. Variations in focus and structure between disciplines were also found. q Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction The genre analysis of academic writing has tended to focus on the research article RA far more than on longer theses and dissertations for research degrees Bunton, ; Swales, E-mail address: dbunton hku.

This study, therefore, set out to discover what common, generic features PhD Conclusion chapters in a range of disciplines share and what variety they display. The paper begins with a review of previous research into Discussions and Conclusions, describes the corpus of 45 PhD theses and methods of analysis, phd thesis discussion conclusions, then presents the findings and proposes three models for Conclusions with some disciplinary variation, phd thesis discussion conclusions.

Previous research In one of the early studies of the research article, Hill, Soppelsa, and Westpp. The conclusion of the Discussion which they analysed notes limitations of the study and suggests areas for future research. To paraphrase, Hill et al. typify the Discussion as comprising: ImplicationsoLimitationsoRecommendations. Some of the most important work on Discussions has been done by Dudley-Evans. His work is particularly relevant to this study as it was carried out on the longer genre of the Masters dissertation, rather than the research article.

His study of the Introduction and Discussion sections of seven MSc dissertations found three main parts to the Discussions: Introduction, Evaluation of results and Conclusions and future work. He identified 11 moves, modified in to nine moves, in the Evaluation of results: Information move, phd thesis discussion conclusions, Statement of results, Finding, Un expected outcome, Reference to previous research, Explanation, Claim, Limitation and Recommendation.

He noted that the moves were usually cyclical, with each cycle normally headed by a Statement of results, which was the only compulsory move, the others being optional.

The Conclusions and future work part, the most relevant to this study, he found to contain: Summary of main results Summary of main claims Recommendations about future work. Even in this research on MSc dissertations, phd thesis discussion conclusions Conclusion described is still a part of the Discussion section rather than a separate section or chapter. Pengphd thesis discussion conclusions, looking at chemical engineering research articles, found Discussion moves very similar to those of Dudley-Evans.

Even in advice given to students, the distinction between Discussions and Conclusions is not always made. Swales and Feakp. They propose three moves for Discussions, the first quite extensive, consolidating research space, and the other two quite short, dealing with implications and further research. Another research-based book of advice to students, Weissberg and Bukerpp. but sometimes. is called conclusions, phd thesis discussion conclusions.

These later elements are: Implications of the study Recommendations for future research and practical applications. One of the only studies that report on separate Conclusion phd thesis discussion conclusions in RAs is Yang and Allison as they set out to see how writers in applied linguistics move from results to conclusions.

The more frequent moves and steps they found in the Conclusion sections are set out in Table 1. This review has shown that Discussions are more prominent in the literature than Conclusions. The Conclusion is usually seen as an alternative and less common name for the Discussion section of a research article, as the final part of the Discussion section of an MSc dissertation, or the final chapter of an MBA dissertation, phd thesis discussion conclusions.

None of the studies look at PhD thesis Conclusions. The study from which this research grew Bunton, found that the structural prominence of Discussions and Conclusions with the PhD theses is reversed: there was nearly always a final chapter with Conclusion s or Summary in the title but rarely a chapter with Discussion in the title. In that study, some theses had sections called Results and Discussion or Findings and Discussion, and some had sections called Conclusion s in most of their chapters.

Those earlier Conclusion sections were all found to contain discussion see Section 4. A key question which this paper will set out to answer is what happens when the Conclusion becomes a chapter? Or to put it another way, if there has already been discussion in earlier chapters or sections, are there qualitative differences in the concluding chapter of a PhD thesis compared with the final part of an article or dissertation Discussion?

Method This study expanded the original corpus of 13 PhD theses in Bunton to 45, the same 45 theses as in the study of PhD Introductions reported in Bunton Theses were selected from departments and faculties across the University of Hong Kong HKU proportional to their Phd thesis discussion conclusions output, but with not more than four theses from any one department.

Most of the thesis writers were Chinese speakers from Hong Kong or mainland China. However, 11 theses, nearly a quarter of the corpus, were written by non-Chinese research students, most of them native or near-native speakers of English from Western countries or the South Asian sub-continent. One interest in the study was to see if there were disciplinary differences in the way Conclusion chapters were written. Casanave and Hubbard separated their corpus into science and technology disciplines STphd thesis discussion conclusions, and humanities and social sciences HSS.

Analysis began with the final chapter of each of the 45 theses. As these are common section headings in other Conclusion chapters, the final two chapters of these two theses were analysed as if they were one chapter in two sections. Another thesis was in two parts with a Conclusion chapter to each part but no overall concluding chapter, phd thesis discussion conclusions. In the same way, these two chapters were treated as if they were one chapter in two sections.

Conversely, one thesis had no chapter that played any concluding role and so it was omitted from the analysis, other than to note that one of 45 PhD theses had no concluding chapter phd thesis discussion conclusions to reduce the number of ST Conclusions to Finally there were three cases in which phd thesis discussion conclusions concluding role was found only in the final section of a longer final or penultimate chapter.

This left a corpus of 44 thesis conclusions, 38 of them single chapters, three being two chapters, and three being the final section of a final or penultimate chapter, phd thesis discussion conclusions. Nonetheless, in this paper I shall refer to them all as concluding chapters or Conclusions as this is their most common status.

Once the 44 Conclusions were identified, phd thesis discussion conclusions, their titles, section headings and lengths were compared, phd thesis discussion conclusions, as well as the number of references they make to previous research in the literature.

The biggest task was to analyse the Conclusions for the generic moves and steps their authors make to achieve their purpose.

As work progressed all Conclusions were re-analysed at least once phd thesis discussion conclusions see whether they too contained moves or steps newly identified in other Conclusions. Finally, models of thesis Conclusions were proposed using the moves and steps usually present i. in at least half the chapters and those present in a quarter of them, with particular attention given to differences between the ST and HSS disciplines.

It should phd thesis discussion conclusions noted that citations from certain theses do not contain keywords indicating the subject matter in order to respect a promise of anonymity given to writers in the original study.

What is cited is thus the non-subject-specific language which, in fact, constitutes the linguistic signals of these moves and steps. Key lexical signals are given in bold. Findings This section will report the findings, first on the status and titles of concluding chapters, then on their length, number of references, section headings, and finally the generic moves and steps identified, proposing three models for thesis Conclusions 4. Status of concluding chapters As we saw in the literature review, RA Conclusions have often been found to be the final part of a Discussion section, not constituting a section in their own right.

If that is so, phd thesis discussion conclusions, the structural status of Discussions and Conclusions is virtually reversed in PhD theses. Forty one of the 45 theses in this corpus have one or even two chapters that play a concluding role, although their titles vary considerably see Table 2.

Of course, discussion often takes place in chapters or sections with other, topic-specific titles, phd thesis discussion conclusions. Titles of concluding chapters Titles are important as they give some idea of the role which the writer sees a chapter or section playing. The titles of concluding chapters were found to vary considerably. Phd thesis discussion conclusions concluding chapter had a topic-specific title rather than a generic one but was found to play a concluding role.

The other 16 concluding chapters had different titles that combined various elements that are often seen as part of a concluding role. They are all set out in Table 2, phd thesis discussion conclusions. Length The lengths of the 44 thesis Conclusions ranged from 2 to 38 pages, averaging 9. There was a marked difference, however, between those in ST disciplines and those in HSS disciplines.

ST conclusions averaged 4. References The number of references to other authors in a thesis Conclusion is of interest as it gives some indication of how much the conclusion refers back to previous phd thesis discussion conclusions in summing up the findings and significance of the thesis and in making recommendations for further research. When this is expressed as a percentage of the number of references in the thesis as a whole, it gives an indication of the importance of the concluding chapter compared with other chapters in positioning the research study in relation to the literature.

In these 44 thesis Conclusions, the number of references to the literature ranged from nil toaveraging There was again a marked difference between ST Conclusions, which averaged Compared with other chapters in the thesis, all but two ST Conclusions had the lowest or second lowest number of references.

This was also true for nine of the 15 HSS Conclusions, indicating that reference to previous research may play a relatively small role in most thesis conclusions, especially in the ST theses. On the other hand, it could be argued that where there has been an extensive literature review, it may only be necessary to refer to a few key studies in order to place the current research in context and show its significance.

By contrast, two HSS Conclusions had the second highest number of references in the thesis, one in Education, the other in Architecture. Section headings Section headings are also helpful in phd thesis discussion conclusions what the writer is hoping to accomplish in different parts of the chapter, the moves the writer has in mind. However, slightly more than half of the concluding chapters 23 of 44 were not divided into sections especially in ST disciplines.

Writing a discussion for a research paper or thesis

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How to Write a Thesis Conclusion | Checklist and Examples

Conclusion This paper has indicated that the generic structure of the Conclusion chapter of a PhD thesis differs qualitatively from the final part of a Discussion section in a research article or masters dissertation, displaying a wider range of moves and steps Concluding chapters showed some disciplinary variation between science and technology disciplines and those in the humanities and social blogger.comted Reading Time: 10 mins The dissertation conclusion is the final chapter of the thesis, wrapping up the research conducted and summarizing the key outcomes of a discussion section. How To Write A Dissertation Conclusion Answer the research questions of the study. These are solutions to the questions that you brought forward in the first chapter of the dissertation May 08,  · This is a Phd Thesis Discussion Conclusionsgood question and the answer will be yes you can pay an Phd Thesis Discussion Conclusionsacademic writer to do the paper for you. /10()