| Home | Syllabus | Course Material | Assignments | INST799 - Thesis Research | |||||||||||
Thesis Statement
In *one sentence*, state your thesis. This is trickier than it sounds! It needs to describe what you will come out with, not what you will do. For example, a bad thesis would be "We will investigate he benefits of Technique X." Investigating isn't a result. A thesis statement would be something like "Technique X is useful for doing Task Y."
Note that you need a thesis regardless of whether you are doing a thesis project or a capstone project. The thesis is the guiding idea behind your work. I suggest emailing me your ideas about this as the weeks progress before class so I can help you get this right. It is very important!
Literature Review
The purpose of a literature review is to place your work in the context of existing research. You will need a literature review if you are doing a thesis or a capstone, but they will be different.
For a thesis, you are creating a new research contribution, so you need to show where there is an open and unsolved research problem. Thus, your literature review should show all the existing and related literature surrounding your research question and demonstrate the open research area that does not currently have a solution. Be careful not to be too dismissive of the existing work, though. You should describe each article and then describe either how it inspired your work (e.g. how you are building on it) and/or the things it doesn't address that your work will.
For a capstone, you do not need to be solving a new research problem, but you should be creating a new tool or insight from your work. You should also describe all the related literature with the goal of demonstrating you understand all the work in the area and how it supports the project you are doing.
This article is a pretty nice description of how to write a literature review. However, the best thing to look at is the literature reviews in existing CHI papers, which will illustrate what is commonly acepted.
Your literature review should be 1-2 pages in normal formatting. It could be shorter or longer depending on your project, but use that as a guideline. If it's 5 pages, it's way too long, and if it's half a page, it's probably too short.
Working Prototype / Instrument / Etc.
Our goal is for you to run a pilot study and fix up your experiemntal protocols this semester. That means you will need to have a working prototype to test. By next class, you should have the initial implementation. That will give you a couple weeks to polish it while you are developing your experimental protocols, developing the methodology, and writing the rest of the term.
If you are building something, you should bring fully working code to class in our next meeting. You should demonstrate it for the class. This will not likely be the final thing you use for your experiments in the spring, but It absoultely needs to be working and ready to show.
If you are doing a survey or formative study, you should bring your survey instrument (the questions and scales on which they will be answered). Note that if this is the case, you should be sure your literature review includes research that helped you develop your survey. Building surveys is hard to do correctly, and generally you want to build off existing ones rather than creating all your questions from scratch.