Extended Essay Preparation Teaching and Learning Excellence Centre

Getting Started Pick a topic you would like to know more about? Remember you will be spending a significant amount of time on the extended essay so choose a topic you enjoy and genuinely interests you Be realistic in what you can achieve in a specific time frame. The best dissertations are well- researched and complete so choose a topic that is manageable

Statement and Aims of Research What do you want to investigate? During this investigation what do you hope to achieve? Be specific: Identify timeframes (e.g. 19 th Century/ ), key figures (e.g. Sartre) and key concepts (e.g. speciesism) We can utilise this as a working title

The right, the good and Christian ethics: an argument for the place of Christian ethics in contemporary public moral deliberation through an analysis of the moral theories of John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas and Charles Taylor (O’Reardon, 2004)

Research Question Now that we have a specific aim and working title, the next step is to formulate it into a question Is there a place for Christian ethics in contemporary public moral deliberation?

Researching Our next step is to review existing literature and create a literature review which we can use in our extended essay and identify gaps in the existing knowledge Utilise online databases (see E-Resources on Moodle) and library search functions to quickly identify relevant literature Scan abstracts and table of contents Use note-taking skills such as spidergram/ Cornell methods (see Note Taking Workshop on Moodle)

Literature Review “Build an argument, not a library” -Rudestam and Newton (1992) Your literature review should not summarise what you have found. It should organise existing knowledge in a cohesive way evaluate it by way of critical reading Ask yourself: how does this literature fit together (synthesis) and what relevance is to my own extended essay?

Time to Plan!

Planning Create a basic plan/ framework

Planning From here we will create a more detailed breakdown plan that will include a brief reference list for each section and word count: Example o Section 1: This section will provide context/ background using Smyth (2001), O’Brien (2010)………. Word count: 2000 o Section 2: This section will investigate the…. Word count: 2500 o Section 3: This section will further investigate X and develop Y…. Word count: 2000 o Section 4: This section will critique X……. Word count: 1500 ……………

Example Layout TITLE PAGE o Name/ Research Question/ Title DECLARATION PAGE TABLE OF CONTENTS o Chapter 1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 etc… ACKNOWLEDGMENTS o Think Oscar speech! ABSTRACT o word summary