What Goes In a Conclusion Chapter

The conclusion chapter of a thesis is the chapter in which you use the findings of your study or the theory you developed in your study to critique the field. You want to explain to the readers the importance of your study and help them understand it's value. Typically the chapter starts with a brief summary of your study. In the main body of the chapter, you identify the contributions your study makes to the field, the implications of your study, the limitations of your study, and directions for future research. Graduate students often end the chapter with a concluding paragraph that ties everything together.

Summary of the Study

The introduction paragraph of a conclusion chapter is often a summary of the study itself. This summary reports the main points from all the preceding chapters, using one or two sentences to summarize each chapter. By reading this summary, your reader will be reminded of the main points of the thesis and be primed for a discussion of the impact of your study on the field.

Contributions

Contributions of your study are ways that your study has extended, modified, or added to knowledge in the field. These contributions may include novel findings, new theory, a better description of the phenomenon you studied, a new approach to studying your research problem, a method for improving student learning of a particular topic, a framework that describes common student misconceptions about a particular topic, and so on. Identifying the contributions of your study is a critical part of reporting your research, because it helps the reader see why your research is important and how it might impact the field.

In many published research papers, the contributions of the the study are identified in the discussion section. You may also want to take this approach. However, it is often a good idea to wait until Chapter 5 to describe your contributions. The danger of identifying the contributions in the Chapter 4 discussion section is that they sometimes get lost in your interpretation of what your results mean. Because your readers (especially your committee members) will be judging the quality of your thesis at least partially on what it contributes to the field, it is better to describe your contributions in a separate section.

A strong thesis typically makes three or more contributions to the field. While you don't want to make up contributions or include trivial contributions, you nonetheless want to think carefully about how your study extends the field and discuss all of the contributions of the study. If you are struggling to identify contributions, it is likely because you have lost touch with the arguments and literature in Chapters 1-2. Take some time to reread this chapters with an eye toward identifying how your study adds to what is known in the field.

Typically, a contributions section is organized around the contributions themselves, with each contribution having its own paragraph. Your goal for each paragraph should be to describe the contribution and persuade your reader that the contribution is significant and important. It is typically helpful to bring up some of the literature in Chapters 1-2 as you describe how your study extends what is known.

Implications

Implications of your study are the new ways of thinking, acting, and valuing that are suggested by your research. Implications almost always follow directly from the contributions that you have identified in your contributions section. Consequently, you can identify many of the implications of your study by considering how your contributions might suggest new ways of thinking, acting, and valuing, particularly in regards to your research problem. Note that contributions can give rise to two different types of implications: implications for research (e.g., theorizing, designing data collection instruments, categorizing phenomena, etc.) and implications for practice (i.e., teaching, curriculum design, assessment, etc.). And a single contribution may have multiple implications of the same type. So don't feel like you have to limit your implications to just one per contribution. On the other hand, if you think of implications of your study that don't seem to follow from any of the contributions that you have listed, it's likely that you have left out a contribution. It would probably be worth your while to try to identify the contribution that gives rise to the implication you have been unable to match.

As you think about organizing your implications section, you may want to choose one of the following two common approaches. The first approach consists of describing implications in clusters that correspond to the contribution that gave rise to those particular implications. If you were following this approach, you might discuss all of the implications that are associated with the first contribution you identified in your contribution section, either placing them in a single paragraph, giving each implication its own paragraph, or perhaps even grouping all of the research implications into one paragraph and the teaching implications in another. These implications would then be followed by a description of the implications associated with the second contribution, and so on. The advantage of this approach to organizing your implications is that it allows a clear connection between contributions and implications.

A second approach is to separate the implications into two different sections, one consisting of the implications for research, and the other the implications for practice. The implications in each section are then discussed in whatever order makes the most sense to you. The value of this approach is that it allows you to communicate more clearly how implications may be related to or build off each other.

Limitations and Directions for Future Research

It is not only important to identify what your research says about your research problem, but also what it can't say or what it shouldn't be interpreted as saying. In your limitations section, you need to qualify your findings in terms of how conclusive they are, how generalizable they are, and how they can be extended through additional research. Note that threats to validity should be addressed in your methods chapter, not in this section; you'll want to assuage your reader's concern about the validity of your study before they read the results, not after.

All studies have limitations, because it is not possible for a study to conclusively address every issue related to your research problem. Consequently, your readers will not think less of your study because you admit there are limitations. In fact, your readers are much more likely to think negatively about your study if you don't acknowledge its limitations than if you do.

The common approach to this section is to describe a limitation, respond to the limitation, and then move on to the next limitation. The most common way of responding to a limitation is to use one or more of the following strategies:

• Point out that the limitation is unavoidable. For example, you may have to admit that your sample may be biased, because you could only interview students who volunteered for the study. But you would also point out that human subjects approval required this condition, and that anyone studying this population would face similar restrictions.
• Minimize the limitation. For example, you might note that even though your sample might be biased because you could only include volunteers, your participants included equal numbers of males and females from Seventh Grade Math, Pre-algebra, and Algebra classes, the three types of mathematics classes for 7th graders at that particular school. This could help minimize the concerns about sample bias.
• Suggest a direction of research that would address the limitation. For example, suppose you found that when answering word problems on a written test, 40% of the 7th-grade participants reasoned additively about 1 or more of the 5 situations in which quantities were related proportionally, but only 5% reasoned additively about all 5 situations. You might note that a limitation of the study is that it does not explain why students reason proportionally on some problems and additively on others. Because you noticed that the two most common situations that students thought about incorrectly were situations with which they may be unfamiliar, you might suggest that researchers study how students' familiarity with the real-world contexts in which the proportion problems are situated affects their strategy selection.

Once you identify a limitation or two, you may realize that there are, in fact, too many limitations to list them all (as is the case with any study). To identify the limitations that are crucial to discuss in this section, go back to the purpose of your research, and identify how your study falls short in addressing this purpose. These are the important limitations that you need to address in this section.

Sometimes your limitations do not suggest any new directions for research. When this happens, you may want to split the limitations and directions for future research into two sections. To identify meaningful directions for future research, think about other aspects of the research problem that still need to be better understood. Then identify the aspects that you think need to be studied first, either because they are more important to understand than other aspects, or because the understanding of other aspects depends on understanding these aspects first. Your findings will likely point to which ones should be studied first. These are the topics that you should talk about in your future research section.

Concluding Paragraph

At the very end of your thesis, you will probably want (and your advisor will probably insist) that you write a concluding paragraph. Your reader will need this if they are to have a sense of closure. The easiest way to write this paragraph is to restate the reason or reasons you performed your study, talk about how your research addressed or responded to these reasons, and advocate for further attention to the research problem so that it can eventually be solved.

Writing Tips

Write Chapter 5 last. Chapter 5 is probably the one thing in your thesis that you want to put off. It is much easier when you have solid drafts of the previous four chapters, because it will draw heavily upon the points you have made in these chapters. So as you plan the writing of your thesis, plan to first write a solid draft of Chapter 4 and revise Chapters 1-3 before writing Chapter 5. If you've been living in these four chapters, Chapter 5 will be much easier to write.

Common Graduate Student Mistakes

Failing to include contributions and implications. Some graduate students struggle with identifying the contributions and implications of their research. This is usually because they have been so involved with the small detail work of data analysis and writing the other chapters that they have a hard stepping back and thinking about the big picture. If you are struggling to identify contributions and implications, talk with your advisor. Because your advisor has kept up with your work, but has not been submerged in the data and the detailed work of writing, he or she can probably see the contributions and implications much better than you can. A 15 minute discussion can go a long way toward helping you identify the contributions and implications of your study.

Confusing implications with contributions. Sometimes it is difficult to determine if a claim is a contribution or an implication. Since they both add knowledge to the field, you may be tempted not to distinguish between the two. To researchers, however, contributions and implications have an important difference: a contribution comes from your analysis of the data, while an implication goes beyond what you can justify with your data. Consequently, contributions are viewed as likely being more valid than implications. Because of the potential validity difference between the two, you must separate implications from contributions. To do this, determine for each claim whether or not you could support it with data from your study, or if you have to rely on a logical argument instead. Claims that are supportable by evidence from your data are contributions; claims that cannot be supported by your data are implications.

Overextending. Occasionally researchers are too exuberant in the claims they make about contributions and implications. For example, suppose that I claim that based on my analysis of a teacher's questioning in an inquiry-based classroom, I have identified the types of questions that teachers ask during inquiry-based instruction. Such a claim is likely too strong for a study based on one teacher. To avoid making this mistake, examine each contribution or implication in your conclusion chapter to see if it is adequately supported by evidence or by a reasonable argument. If you think you are overextending, try hedging a little by including such phrases as "probably," "might," "it seems likely," etc. For example, I might change the claim above by saying that I have identified some of the types of questions asked by teachers engaged in inquiry-based instruction. I might further hedge by saying that it is likely that at least some of the types of question I found in the data are commonly asked by teachers during inquiry-based instruction. If you don't think you can even support the hedged version of a claim, remove it entirely.