Thesis / Dissertation Topic or Outline (Part 1)

Graduate students are forbidden to rehash any study and pass it as their thesis or dissertation. A mere change of research venue, subjects/participants, and retention of a more or less similar conceptual framework, related literature, problems, hypotheses, and instruments of a previous study will not amount to a pioneering research. For that means that one is not about to embark on an investigation that would bear a fresh contribution to the present pool of knowledge. Being the first of its kind should be a quality that all graduate theses and dissertations must hold in common. The UP College of Education should thus exhort its graduating masters and doctoral candidates to submit a proposed topic that could lead to a pioneering research in education.

Pioneering study

“Pioneering study” is commonly taken as a research concerned with important problems that had never been addressed in the past. But a research may also count as a pioneering study in so far as it seeks to address valuable questions that other related studies failed to answer adequately or correctly. This means that the thesis/dissertation topic should entail a study that does not simply replicate another work or other studies. As mentioned, a mere change of site of investigation and group of samples/subjects/participants is not enough for the study to count as a pioneering one. For its problems and methodology remains a mere copy of what could be found in other similar research investigations.

Replication of the study, although not disallowed outside thesis/dissertation writing, is done simply to disconfirm another researcher’s findings or claims. So, even if a duplicate study is a valid research that can be done by any teacher or student researcher, it will not constitute an outstanding work, which is an exercise that requires the student to contribute to the current fund of knowledge. Suffice it to say that a valid topic for a graduate study is a research that seeks to uncover something that has yet to be a part of public knowledge. In the words of Joe Wolfe: “…your research must discover something hitherto unknown.” (In How to Write a PhD Thesis.)

Here's what Howard Gaardner (2000) said about the sort of problems that keep many educationists busy nowadays:

"Everywhere, much discussion about education remains mired in the parochial. Frankly, I am tired of writings by educators that focus on the instrumental or the momentary: Should we distribute vouchers so that youngsters can attend private schools? What are the advantages of charter schools? Are teacher unions the problem? The solution? Should teaching degrees be granted at the college level, only in graduate school, or only for those trained “on site”? How much education should take place at the computer or over the Internet? Should we have local control, national standards, international comparisons?" (In The Disciplined Mind. New York: Penguin Books. p. 15.)

Indeed, why can't we be equally, if not more, interested in higher and enduring problems in education?

See Thesis / Dissertation Topic or Outline Proposal (Part 2) for part two of this post.