Jun 26, · Finding and Choosing Dissertation Committee Members Ask Your Committee Chair. Talking to your chair is a good place to start in looking for additional dissertation committee members. Who do they recommend for your specific project? You can ask who they don’t work well with, but most people won’t answer this question for obvious reasons May 11, · After all, your committee members have significant control over your life for as long as you’re writing your dissertation. Make Life Easy for Your Committee. It’s always good to send your committee members a copy of your PowerPoint presentation and the most recent copy of your proposal the day before the defense Folks: The posting below looks at some important factors to take into consideration when selecting a dissertation topic. It is from Chapter 4 Choosing a Dissertation Topic, in the book, The Dissertation Journey: A Practical and Comprehensive Guide to Planning, Writing, and Defending Your Dissertation, by Carol M. Roberts. Published by Corwin, A SAGE Company,
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Waiting for inspiration is not the best approach to topic selection. Dissertation topics do not mystically appear. Some students attempt to find a topic that fits a set of already-collected data, a certain population to which the student has access, or a preferred research methodology.
This backward approach is also inappropriate and certain to irritate a potential advisor. The posting below looks at some important factors to take into consideration when selecting a dissertation topic. It is from Chapter 4 Choosing a Dissertation Topic, in the book, The Dissertation Journey: A Practical and Comprehensive Guide to Planning, Writing, and Defending Your Dissertationby Carol M.
Published by Corwin, A SAGE Company, Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, California, Fax:www. com Choosing your dissertation committee © by Carol M. All choosing your dissertation committee reserved. Reprinted with permission. The first major challenge in the dissertation process lies in choosing a dissertation topic.
Your choice determines how long it will take you to complete your study. For most doctoral students, it is an agonizing decision, mainly because of the uncertainty surrounding it. Has it already been adequately researched? Is it worthy of investigation? How original does it have to be? Is it manageable in scope? To know whether or not it has been researched, or if it is important to the field, you must first immerse yourself in the literature base.
It would not be worthwhile to conduct another study about a problem that choosing your dissertation committee been sufficiently investigated unless, however, you conduct a meta-analysis, meta-ethnographic analysis, or literature synthesis. These research approaches synthesize findings across several studies.
The most effective and efficient ways to select a topic are the following:. Commonly, students consider three to five potential topics before finally settling on one. Scrapping a topic and starting over at least once is the norm. Dissertation topics rarely emerge out of the blue; you must proactively search them out.
Here are some potential sources:. Your own professional interests. What excites and energizes you? What career goals could be enhanced by studying a particular topic? Faculty members, professional colleagues, and fellow students. Listen to their suggestions about potential topics. Professional journals in your field, choosing your dissertation committee.
This is where you can find out the hot topics of choosing your dissertation committee day and for the near future. Ask them to help you run a database search on some topic of interest. Make a list of key words and phrases to initiate the search. Review previously written dissertations, choosing your dissertation committee.
Consult Proquest Dissertations and Theses Dissertation Abstracts International and American Doctoral Dissertationsfrom whom you can order dissertations choosing your dissertation committee interest. Oral defense. Choosing your dissertation committee as many of these as you can, choosing your dissertation committee.
It opens your eyes to what happens during a dissertation defense. Current theories. Have any new theories come out in your field, or are existing theories being questioned? Conferences and seminars. Often these deal with current interest areas in the field.
Talk with presenters and authors to get their ideas about researchable topics. Outside agencies or professional organizations that conduct research. Excellent resources are the 10 Regional Educational Laboratoriesand the American Educational Research. Leading scholars in your interest areas, choosing your dissertation committee. Usually, authors and researchers eagerly talk with someone interested in their ideas and research.
Call and find out what they are currently doing, and ask their advice about potential studies. Your current job setting. Are there problems that need solutions in your workplace? Your boss might have a pet topic that could enhance your career opportunities. However, be cautious. If you think a topic might be suggested in which you have no interest, you are better served not to conduct this research. A dissertation is an extensive, scholarly endeavor, and the topic should be one in which you have strong interest.
References in your field. Many handbooks and bibliographies exist in most subject areas. Some useful examples in the field of education are the following:. Handbook of Research on Teaching. Published by the AERA, this handbook provides. Harvard Educational Review. Edited and published by graduate students at Harvard. University, this journal provides reviews and opinions on the most topical educational.
Review of Educational Research. Published by the AERA, this quarterly journal. publishes review articles that summarize, in a comprehensive and integrated fashion. Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education NSSE.
Sincethe. Distinguished scholars in these areas write the articles. The topics are selected because of their timeliness or immediate practical value to educators and researchers Martin,choosing your dissertation committee, p. All discipline areas have their own encyclopedias, handbooks, or yearbooks. You can access them on the Internet by keying in your area e.
How do you know if your particular topic has the potential to become a scholarly dissertation? Most universities and doctoral faculties agree that the doctoral dissertation should be an original piece of research and significant to the field.
However, what constitutes originality or significance is open to interpretation and usually differs among various faculty advisors. Madsen clarified the elusive term originality. He claims that a topic must have the potential to do at least one of the following: Uncover new facts or principles, suggest relationships that were previously unrecognized, challenge existing truths or assumptions, affort new insights into little-understood phenomena, or suggest new interpretations of know facts that can alter people's perceptions of the world around them.
No hard-and-fast rules exist for choosing your dissertation committee a topic. Following are some general criteria for considering potential topics:. It needs to hold your interest for a long time. It takes longer than you anticipate to write an acceptable dissertation. It must be manageable in size. Most students begin with a topic that is too large. Your goal is to add a small but significant piece to the knowledge base and graduate!
Save the Nobel Prize-level research to do as a postgraduate, choosing your dissertation committee. It must have the potential to make an original and significant contribution to knowledge. Can you find a hole, a gap, a missing piece in the knowledge base that you can fill and that would be useful to theory or practice? It must be doable within your time frame and budget, choosing your dissertation committee.
Given your current situation, is it a feasible topic to undertake? Traveling to Russia or conducting a longitudinal study may not choosing your dissertation committee possible.
It has to have obtainable data. You must be able to collect data for the study from an appropriate sample size in a reasonable period of time. It has not already been sufficiently researched.
There is no value to conducting one more study about a topic that has been researched over and over again. It should be acceptable to your advisor and committee members. Start a choosing your dissertation committee topic file. As you get ideas about possible topics, place them in a separate file folder that you can review from time to time.
This helps keep your topic antenna up and alert for new ideas. I cannot emphasize enough the choosing your dissertation committee of making a concerted effort to become familiar with the literature and to talk with experts in your field.
Selecting the Dissertation Committee!
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Jun 26, · Finding and Choosing Dissertation Committee Members Ask Your Committee Chair. Talking to your chair is a good place to start in looking for additional dissertation committee members. Who do they recommend for your specific project? You can ask who they don’t work well with, but most people won’t answer this question for obvious reasons May 11, · After all, your committee members have significant control over your life for as long as you’re writing your dissertation. Make Life Easy for Your Committee. It’s always good to send your committee members a copy of your PowerPoint presentation and the most recent copy of your proposal the day before the defense professors and dissertation committee members of doctoral students in the fields of education, policy, leadership, curriculum and instruction, and social work, we have heard students express confusion, a lack of knowledge, and frustration with the challenge of choosing a theoretical framework and understanding how to apply it throughout
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