Session Information
99 ERC SES 11 B, Workshop: ‘Thinking like a researcher’: How can my doctoral thesis display the level of scholarship and high level thinking examiners expect to see?
Research Workshop
Contribution
Thinking is pretty much invisible. Mostly, thinking happens under the hood, within the marvelous engine of our mind-brain. The characteristics of ‘thinking like a researcher’ can be developed in candidates throughout their doctoral journey and exhibited in their thesis. However, thinking must be visible, explicit and accounted for in the text of the thesis, so that scholarship of the thesis can be acknowledged by examiners. Exhibiting high level thinking is dependent upon possessing understanding and having the capability to apply that understanding in the approach to research and defense that includes conceptual grasp. In this way supervisors and candidates ensure that a thesis explicitly demonstrates the characteristics expected of doctoral researchers and they are worthy of the award of a doctorate.
Some of the issues that will be discussed in the workshop are: The nature of doctorateness and what examiners look for in a thesis, levels of thinking in the process of doing research, the nature of conceptual frameworks and how to design them, conclusions and contribution to knowledge, practical strategies to audit the process of research to ensure that it demonstrates methodological rigour and scholarship.
The workshop will illustrate how to approach research in a scholarly manner moving from the descriptive to the conceptual by considering critical factors that represent the high quality that doctoral research should demonstrate. It will show how candidates can raise their level of thinking and exhibit in their thesis that they are ‘thinking like researchers’ by:
- Identifying the features in theses where high level thinking is required;
- Illustrating how examiners review and assess these features through specific sets of questions;
- Using examples from theses and examiners’ reports that point to ‘good’ or ‘bad’ aspects of doctoral writing;
- Providing strategies and models for candidates to adopt in writing their thesis;
- Allowing participants to discuss some of these issues in small groups guided by assigned question/tasks.
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