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