How to Write a Better Minor Thesis by Paul Gruba

Author:Paul Gruba
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2014-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

Developing Critical Thinking

Throughout your thesis, seek to develop and demonstrate your critical thinking skills.

How do you convert your initial ‘literature survey’ into a critical review of existing theory that leads logically into the work that you design and undertake yourself? A review of current literature serves three purposes: it gives the background information required to establish the extent and significance of your research problem; it identifies and discusses attempts by others to solve similar problems; and it provides examples of methods they have used in attempts to get these solutions. Make sure you deal with all of these.

It is likely (and expected) that you will have read much more widely in the topic area than you need for your review. Your initial journey through the literature will help you to gain a better understanding of your central problem, but you do not need not to write about every paper in full. Keep in mind the aim and scope of your thesis: How does the existing literature relate to these?

As you read, write: the act of writing forces you to come to grips with ideas and focus your attention on the most significant arguments. Eventually, you will gain a sense of how previous research is leading you towards possible ways of dealing with your problem. As you develop a stronger sense of the field, strive to filter the good from the bad. What you are doing at this point is creating an internal set of criteria on which to accept or reject arguments; that is, through this process you are developing the skills of critical thinking. By now you will probably have written many fragments and mini-reviews, and it is time to write a serious first draft of your ‘critical review of existing literature’. Before you hand this to your supervisor for feedback, it is a good idea to put it aside for a week or so and work on something else. Then come back to it and rework it into a second draft in which you try to articulate the criteria you have been developing, and demonstrate to readers just how sharp your criticisms are. Read, and think, like an examiner.

Effective critical thinking depends on effective reading. For me, the process of reading a piece of research literature falls into phases. The first phase, counter-intuitively, is fairly uncritical. I try to get a sense of what the researchers were trying to do and whether the problem is genuinely interesting, and then to understand how they undertook the work. Once I have a broad grasp of what a paper is about, I begin to look at issues such as whether the results really support the conclusions and whether the experiments seem robust. A big question is whether the work is significant; some papers are genuinely remarkable, but most are an incremental contribution and need to be analyzed from that perspective. In considering whether the work is reliable, it also helps to consider the reputation of the authors, which may seem unfair,

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