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Structuring Methods/Results/Conclusions
Methods
• How to help the reader know what you did. Precisely.
• Everything in the methods section is related to your problem statement.
• The methods section is to help your reader know that your study is valid and reliable (trustworthy if you are doing a qualitative study).
Methods SectionIn this order (usually)
• Problem statement exactly as it appears in chapter 1.
• Context in which you are gathering information.ONLY include facts relative to your study.
– If you are doing a study on cooperative learning does it really matter what the mission statement for the school is? Probably not.
– If you are doing a study on the effectiveness of teacher inservice does it really matter that inservice days were recently cut from the teacher contract? Maybe.
– If you said it in the introduction you will probably only need a brief reference here.
Methods SectionIn this order (usually)—cont.
• Description of those from whom you are gathering information.ONLY include facts relative to your study.
– Report gender or other variables if they are relevant to your study. Are these independent variables?
– This is where you talk about how your respondents got into the study.
• Description of the tools you used to gather information.
– This includes a description of how tools were developed. This is really important in some cases.
– If you are using other people’s instruments they need to be cited.
Methods SectionIn this order (usually)—cont. II
• Description of how you gathered information. What procedures did you use?
– Get as specific as you need to for a reader to know how you did what you did.
• A description of how the information will be analyzed.
– Don’t skip this step even if you are doing a qualitative study.
– References to data gathering or analysis procedures?
Results
• If you didn’t talk about it in the methods section you can’t talk about it in results section.
• Alternatively, if you talked about it in the methods section it better be in the results section.
• General statements about what you found. Usually includes statements about data analysis and the themes discovered.
• Description of each theme (including exemplars)
• Summary• Remember that all you are doing is describing the data
after the procedures described in the methods section are applied.
Results—cont. (Qualitative)
• General statements about the data gathered.
• Description of specific findings.
• Tables of specific findings.
• Summary of findings.
• Remember that all you are doing is describing the data after the procedures described in the methods section are applied.
Results—cont. (Quantitative)
• Conclusions are only drawn from what is presented in the Results section.
• Each of the last three sections of your paper flow one from another. They are directly linked together. (Referential Adequacy)
Conclusions
• What did you find relative to your problem statement?
– Discussion of the results in terms of the problem statement
• How does what you found compare to the literature?
– Discussion of the results in terms of the literature review.
• What might you have done differently to improve the quality of the data in your study?
– Discussion of the results in terms of the methods section including issues of reliability and validity.
Conclusions
• You may wish to talk about where further research should go.
– This isn’t necessary but it usually ends up being a further discussion of reliability and validity.
• What does this all mean for your classroom or for education in general? – Finally, you get to give an opinion.
– But, it is based on data.
More Conclusions