You will start working on your dissertation idea very early in your coursework at Capella. No doubt, it will mature and grow, but every single course you take is an opportunity to add to your literature review and to collect articles that support and clarify your dissertation topic.
When you come to the Dissertation Research Seminars, each Track will carry you further along the steps of your research design for your dissertation.
As you know, every step of the research design depends on the depth and breadth of your knowledge on the existing literature of your topic. And how do you deepen and strengthen your literature review? You do it by reviewing existing research, related both to the content of your courses, and also to your dissertation idea, in each and every course.
Not every course will lend itself directly to finding more literature and research on your specific topic. But all of the courses in your specialization require both small-scale literature reviews, known as posts, or responses to a discussion question, and papers, which sometimes are called literature reviews. A course paper is a literature review on an assigned topic.
Always ask yourself, as you approach your final projects, "Can the existing literature related to my topic help me answer the posting question or write my final projects?"
Of course, now and then, when you ask yourself whether your dissertation topic could be related somehow to the course's questions, the answer will be no. But even then, there are two things you can do.
First, ask the faculty instructor of the course for some guidance. He or she probably knows a lot more about nuances in the course's content, and could have a helpful suggestion about building your lit review.
You also can study the methodologies and designs of the research articles that you discover for the course postings or paper. Each piece of research is qualitative, quantitative, or mixed, and it has a research design within that methodology. What can you learn about methodology and the variety of available designs while you're researching a topic for a course? For you to become knowledgeable about research designs is every bit as important as your actual dissertation topic, and there is no reason for you to wait until late in your program and research methods courses to start learning everything you can about methodology now!
In each and every course, resolve to collect as many articles as you can that relate to your dissertation idea. Don't wait. Download them! File them carefully. Develop your own index system or use RefWorks or another software filing system. The library has a number of such resources available—use them!
Learners always want to know how extensive their literature review should be. Let's look at some interesting numbers. Using the keywords "learning theory" and "academic performance," in the abstract, a search of the Dissertations and Theses Full Text database in the Capella library yielded 363 dissertations.
The first 20 were checked and they showed an average of 143 references each.
Our Capella library staff estimates that for every article used in a dissertation, three will have been found and reviewed.
This means, to do an average dissertation, you'll want to collect about 430 articles before finishing your research. This averages out to five new articles a week during each week of each quarter over two years.
So you see, the Dissertation Research Seminar tracks and all your regular courses can work together, allowing you not only to practice the various steps of the design process, but to deepen and broaden your literature review supporting the topic. Take advantage of every discussion question and every final paper to add to your literature review for your dissertation. You won't regret it!
Doc. reference: phd_t1_u01s1_relate.html