Don’t be an ABD (All But Dissertation) – at least not in perpetuity. It gives me hives when I hear about people who do all the coursework for their PhD and then, just don’t do their dissertation. It’s like beating 80% of a videogame and then giving up before the final level. Except this video game charges thousands of dollars and hours of your time. It’s also a thing that happens.
Picture this: you spend years completing your coursework, days and nights and weekends working on paper after paper, and you’re suddenly done with classes. You are offered a nice position that pays decently at an education non-profit (they don’t care if you have the actual degree or not). You get wrapped up in your new job for a year or two and suddenly you realize you haven’t thought about (or maybe even started) your dissertation for some time. At that point you’re like, “why bother when I’ve already got this cushy job?” Then your time to write it dwindles (often after seven years barring an appeal) and you will no longer ever be able to obtain your doctoral degree. Again, absolute hives.
This is why when you complete your coursework your dissertation should be well underway. While it needn’t be completed or even in draft form, you should have a lot of pages already written.
I recommend having a general idea of what kind of research you’d like to do before even applying to the program. You don’t have to stick with it, nor do you have to be entirely sure what the research will look like. But you should have something that gets you excited that you want to learn more about. There needs to be something about which you’re willing to dive into the existing research and have some new and novel things to discover. Your advisor, your coursework, and logistics will inform the direction you take that excitement.
What kinds of things might you want to develop your dissertation around? The world is your sandbox. But here’s a whole bunch of potential general topics.
- Mathematical Identity/Affect
- Assessing metacognition
- Discourse in the classroom
- Particular instructional practices
- Summative assessment
- Formative assessment
- Student understanding of the concept of “function”
- Student understanding of the concept of “fraction”
- Student understanding of the concept of “negative”
- Teacher understanding of particular LMSs or other technologies
- Effective and non-effective intervention strategies
- Teacher professional development
- Issues in rural education
- LGBTQ+ issues and advocacy in mathematics
- Retrieval
Take your area of interest and see if you can come up with a research question. It doesn’t even have to be a sophisticated research question, but it’s a worthwhile exercise to see if it might be something you want to explore. My research questions for my dissertation changed multiple times.
What exactly is a dissertation?
Let’s make sure we’re clear about what a dissertation is. A dissertation is a written record of your doctoral research. It will consist of five chapters:
- Introduction. Here you will introduce your research project, your research questions, and give a motivation for the research.
- Literature Review. Here you will describe the past and current state of your research topic. Describe the gaps in the research which your dissertation fills. You want to introduce any framework you’ll be utilizing.
- Methodology. This section will lay out the methods in which you’ll be collecting and analyzing data. You also want to describe why these methods are most appropriate to address your research question(s).
- Results. Here you will describe the results from your data collection and analysis.
- Discussion. This chapter will interpret the results, describing notable findings (and even non-notable findings). Essentially you are reassessing your research questions in light of your results. You’ll also describe potential future studies and all the stuff your dissertation didn’t address,
On a practical level, your dissertation is the document that proves you know how to conduct and write about deep research. It’s as much a showcase of your ability as it is actual research. That’s why it’s not just a research paper; it’s why it’s 200+ pages long.
There is a school of thought that I’ve heard (and flirted with) that suggests the dissertation is an obstacle that you just have to get over before you can move on with your life. At times that’s how I viewed my dissertation: as something to just get over and done with.
The “just get it over with” mindset can work and it’s not wrong per se, but the more excited you are about your work the more likely you will be to complete it. You’re going to be spending a lot of time with this document. It’s best if you enjoy its company. If you start from a mindset of dread it’ll be tough to retain enough stamina to finish the thing. Even if you’re excited about your dissertation you’ll need to push through moments of difficulty; and that’ll be easier to do if you don’t actively hate it.
Also, you may wish to actually do something with your dissertation. Maybe you’ll write a book based on it, or maybe a couple published papers (remember that you should learn to like writing?). Maybe you’ll present it at conferences. It’ll be one of the most labor intensive things you do in your life. Try to approach it with enthusiasm.
And now some additional, practical advice.
Research subjects
It’s very difficult to obtain approval to do research involving minors. Remember how this series is entitled “How Not to Get Your PhD…”? Yeah, well I did research involving minors (and only kinda barely) and it was a slog to get permission from the University Institutional Review Board (IRB). It took a long time to get approval – 3 or 4 months longer than I anticipated. That meant I was unable to start my research project at the beginning of the school year, which my research project kinda necessitated in its original conception.
And if the IRB doesn’t get you, the school or district might. I had to search far and wide to find a district willing to engage with my research project. My local school district didn’t even let me ask teachers to participate in my research project. Thankfully, I have math friends in Grand Junction, CO. So I drove 5 hours each way every time I wanted to do on-site stuff. That distance did make it difficult to obtain permission forms from every teacher and every student involved.
It’s much easier to do research on your own students or in your own school. You already have social capital built up and can harangue folks that don’t turn in their and their parents’ signed consent forms. Of all the schools and classes I worked with in Grand Junction, I only had one teacher return 100% of the signed consent forms from students and their parents. And that was for just one class. From a cohort of ~13 teachers, I only ended up using one class from one teacher because that’s the only class with a full return rate. Had I been more local (or more annoying) maybe I’d gotten more. As it turns out, for my project, one was plenty.
You can also just do research on adults, such as current or pre-service teachers. It’s much easier to obtain consent forms when you’re not getting them from minors and their parents. If you deliver professional development you can use the participants as research subjects. If you’re at a school you can even use your co-workers as research subjects. While research on teachers is a degree removed from students (if that is your ultimate population interest) may feel a bit flat, it will make the process easier.
Two research questions, max
You’re going to be tempted to ask several research questions. You are so excited about your topic you want to learn and explore every aspect of it. That’s a good attitude to be sure! But whittle it down to two at some point in the process.
I started out with four research questions and my committee quickly told me that was too many and they were right. Don’t try to create the ultimate, definitive research project through your dissertation. Create a targeted study that informs the field a little bit.
Don’t do a mixed methods study
You’re going to want to do a mixed methods project where you collect quantitative data and interview teachers or students to help explain the data. Don’t do it. Just don’t. Why would you do twice the work, including double the literature reviews, double the methodologies, double the results, and double the discussion? Once you’re an education researcher go nuts. It’ll be great to get those grants I’m sure.
A classmate did a mixed methods dissertation and it ended up being about 450 pages long (mine was about 240 for comparison). She’s the one that gave me this advice.
Use your classwork to aid your dissertation
I already offered this advice, but here it is again. Your coursework will entail writing literature reviews, creating surveys, crafting annotated bibliographies, etc. Where you can, use the assignments to write chunks of your dissertation.
By the end of your coursework you should have a draft version of the first three chapters, with an eye toward the fourth. This seems daunting but that means doing a “little bit” of dissertation writing every semester (definitions of “little bit” may vary), in and out of class. If you do that, your latter chapters will come quickly once your done with courses and classes.
In the next post, I’ll continue to discuss the dissertation, but from the standpoint of your doctoral defense. That’s the beautiful and terrifying moment when you present your research to your committee and they give you the thumbs up or thumbs down on whether or not you graduate. I’ll also discuss the checkpoints along the way (preliminary exams, qualifying exams, and IRB approval) that will help refine and/or potentially impede that beautiful and terrifying day.
Takeaways
- Writing 200+ pages can seem like a daunting task for aspirational mathematics education doctoral candidates
- Your dissertation, while a slog, should excite you in the early days
- If your doctoral research involves students, expect approval to conduct research take longer (I’ll discuss this in even more detail, including my experience in the next post)
- Write your dissertation as you progress through the program
- Keep your dissertation focused with one or two research questions and by not doing a mixed methods study
All posts in this series:
Part 1: Why (not) to get your PhD in Mathematics Education
Part 2: Finding the right program
Part 3: What a Math Education Doctoral Degree is (and what it isn’t)
Part 4: Do you like to write? You better.
Part 5: Classes, Coursework, and You
Part 7: Let’s Talk About Your Dissertation: the thing that people just don’t want to do
Part 8: Your defense committee: Prelims, Quals, and the moving of mountains
Part 9: What comes next (for me and for you)?
Appendix A: Slow cooker meals
emergent math 