SENIOR SEMINAR

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Unit 4: Polishing and Presenting Research (materials for the other course units are accessible from the course homepage).

Materials you will find useful for this unit:

The course's big deliverables:

• The grading rubric for your thesis

• The grading rubric for your final presentation of the thesis. Note: some aspects of this assignment will be changed due to social distancing and masking requirements. We likely will do the presentations using virtual meeting software.
  

Thesis assignments (these may be modified as their due dates approach, so don't print them out way ahead of time):

• Thesis assignment 1: Identifying a thesis research question

• Thesis assignment 2: Beginning to operationalize your research project with suitable data and variables

• Thesis assignment 3: A draft of the "front-end: of your thesis" (i.e., a review of previous research to explain why your project is important, what we already know about it, and what new information about it is worth knowing)

• Thesis assignment 4: A draft of the thesis section describing your hypotheses data, variables, and methodology (which will require you to attach a codebook that you will create with this template). 

• Thesis assignment 5: A draft of the thesis's findings (including tables and figures) and conclusions

Professional Development Assignments (these may be modified as their due dates approach, so don't print them out way ahead of time):

• Prof. Development 1: Mandatory mentor meetings (Specifics and grade rubric distributed by email)

• Prof. Development 2: A series of BlackBoard assignments on using SPSS and interpreting its output.

• Prof. assignment 3: Final preliminary presentation

Week 13 (11/12 and 11/14): Student practice presentations. These presentations will include similar content as your last one (see Unit 3, Week 10), but also include:

• A correlation matrix (which should demonstrate that you do not have multicollinearity issues (i.e., a correlation of .7 or higher between any of your independent variables (if you do, see Dr. Setzler for gudance). Note: the matrix will not go into the final version of your presentation; this chart should be a screengrab with SPSS output. You will be putting it up as part of your presentation to verify that you do not have any serious multicollinearity issues that could be messing up your regression results.
  

• Regression results in the finding section. For regression models, they can be screenshots of SPSS output for now. Your later presentations will require polished tables and (if appropriate) graphs of predicted probabilities. 
  

• A conclusion that summarizes the extent to which each of your hypotheses has been confirmed in light of your regression results. 
  

Week 14 (11/19 and 11/21): Final, graded, practice presentations

• Look for the e-mailed announcements about the timing of your presentation. These assignments are graded. Make sure to review complete the checklist noted in the the presentation's instructions and grading criteria (i.e., Prof. Assignment #3).
  

Week 15

• On Tuesday 11/26 by 5pm (i.e., right before Thanksgiving Break), you will need to submit an electronic copy (I will print out a hard copy for you) of Thesis Assignment 5: A draft of the thesis's findings (including tables and figures) and conclusions.

• Tuesday (11/26) will be available for practice and any makeup graded presentations.
  

• Outside of class. as soon as a draft of your findings section is done, you should be devoting considerable effort to revising your entire thesis, including work submitted earlier in the term. Typically, the section that needs the most work is your first major assignment ("The front end" of the study).
  

• No class on Thursday, 11/28: Happy Thanksgiving!

Week 16 (12/3; 12/5, with Final Presentations on Reading Day, December 6)

• Tuesday will be available for practice presentations for any student who wants one more practice opportunity.

• On Thursday, we will meet briefly to wrap up the class. If anyone needs to give a last-minute practice talk that an be arranged.
  

• Friday, December 6 is Reading Day, the day of your final oral presentations. As noted in the syllabus at the start of the course, your final oral presentations are scheduled for this day so that you can invite other students to see your work and so that of the department's faculty can attend the presentations. The grading rubric for the oral presentation is linked at the top of the schedule, as has been the case all term.

Week 17

• The final version of your thesis paper is due by no later than 3pm, Monday, December 9, It should be submitted by e-mail as an attachment. It needs to be in Word or PDF format.  

To make it easier to find things, I have broken up the assignments calendar into multiple units. The material for the previous parts of the course can be accessed by going to the course homepage and following the appropriate links.