Structuring Methods/Results/Conclusio ns

Methods How to help the reader know what you did—precisely. Everything in the methods section is related to your problem statement. Yes, everything!

Methods Section In 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 Section In this order (usually)—cont. Description of those from whom you are gathering information. ONLY include facts relative to your study. – For many of you ethnicity will be reported. – Report gender or other variables if they are relevant to your study. – 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 Section In 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. – Include a description of how instruments or interview protocols were developed if appropriate. A description of how the information will be analyzed. – Don’t skip this step even if you are doing a qualitative study. Congratulations, you are now ready to complete the IRB form.

Results If you did not talk about it in the methods section you cannot talk about it in results section. Alternatively, if you talked about it in the methods section it better be in the results section.

Results—cont. (Qualitative) 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. (Quantitative) General statements about what you found. 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.

Conclusions 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.

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.

More Conclusions You may wish to talk about where further research should go. – This is not 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.