Notices for my students

Thesis

1. Introduction

   This is where the motivation, brief overview and background belongs

   1. What is the problem or issue the thesis will address?

      As a general rule limit this to at most three sentences.

      There can be a brief (at most three paragraphs) motivation aimed at a general audience.

   2. Background

      A survey of prior related research

      Note: use italics to show where terms are defined.

   3. Research Questions (RQs)

      What the research is to address.  These are not hypotheses, those come later.

   4. Any other required background

2. Method

   • in detail
   • includes hypotheses
   • justified only by reference to the Introduction (particularly the background subsection).  Use cross-references as necessary to point the reader to the concepts you introduced earlier.

3. Results

   • purely factual — no interpretation
   • addresses each RQ
   • will often begin with descriptive statistics and details of the population you tested with

4. Discussion

   1. Your conclusion

      What the results mean, indicate or suggest

   2. Your contributions

      What is new, different, and interesting about your work

   3. Limitations (if any)

      Assumptions you made, problems with the experiments, issues that might bring some of the results in to question, and so on

   4. Directions for future work

      Future work can isn't only follow-ups to the results but can also include stuff you might have wanted to put in the introduction for framing but were ultimately inappropriate.  You might also consider an appendix for sketching ideas you may have for related research.

5. References

6. Appendices (if any)

Proposal

Should be the Introduction, Method and supporting References as above.