As I've mentioned on the list before, I convene the undergraduate dissertation which 
means I run a few periodic whole-group sessions throughout the year. There's a glut 
of them at the start of the semester, one of which is an IT based class to sharpen 
specific computer skills for dissertation writing. In previous years it's been a 
little bit flabby and kinda overlapped with other intro sessions, so I'm putting 
together a new exercise that will hopefully be different and useful. I thought I'd 
run it by you folks to see what you think, not least since you had such awesome ideas 
about dissertation writing retreats!

The session I'm planning is called 'Read smart, not hard', the idea being to increase 
their skills in surgical snatch-and-grab reading of primary research articles. Not 
superficial skim reading, but targeted comparisons of specific info.

As a whole group thing it can't be tailored to their individual topics, but that's ok 
this early in the year. On that basis, the exercise will start off by hypothetically 
assuming they all want to research the same thing, namely attitudes towards varieties 
of English. I'll give them four articles they could have found in their hypothetical 
initial trawl of Google Scholar etc. (I know they can already do that anyway from 
previous years' teaching), and we move swiftly on to their actual task:

==================================
1) Compare the methods of these four prior studies:
- How did they recruit their sample of participants?
- Did they attempt to gather a representative sample of the wider population? If so, how?
- What do they say about ethics and consent?
- What was the form of participation in the study (e.g. survey, focus group)?
- What was the measure of attitudes in the study (e.g. Likert scale, qualitative 
transcripts)

2) Compare the principal findings of the study.
- First of all, what did the method actually enable them to find out (and by 
contrast, what was it not able to show them)?
- What were the main overall findings of the study? Top tip: start by reading the 
conclusion, and track back to pick up detail of these key findings.
- Comparing the four articles, what are the relative strengths and weaknesses of 
their different methods in helping the researcher understand language attitudes?

3) Think about your own time and resource constraints in the dissertation, and the 
facilities available to you. Write a short paragraph summing up your review of the 
methodologies in these articles, and explain how you will now proceed to construct 
your analysis.
==================================

I reckon we might get half way through all this before our hour is up, but that's 
fine. I'll tell them to complete it at home, alone or with friends, and discuss it 
with their supervisor in their early meetings with them. Hopefully it'll equip them 
with the right skills not to get too overwhelmed by the early stages of the 
dissertation, and to be able to break it down into manageable stages.

What do you all think of this? And has anyone run a similar workshop? Looking forward 
to hearing back as always :)

Dave

--
Dr. Dave Sayers, ORCID no. 0000-0003-1124-7132
Senior Lecturer, Dept Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University | www.shu.ac.uk
Honorary Research Fellow, Cardiff University & WISERD | www.wiserd.ac.uk
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