Students Should Be Inspired to Take Up Research Work

 

Students attending classes in universities are more or less familiar with terms like assignments, dissertations, thesis, research at both undergraduate and post graduate levels. Since students don’t need to accomplish any research work at secondary and higher secondary levels, most of them find it difficult to cope with the task of preparing research papers when they go to universities. Research papers require certain principles and regulations which have to be addressed properly by students. Particularly, in most of the universities students are under obligations to carry out research work at the end of both bachelor and master programs. These research works are known as thesis or term papers in most of the institutions. During my work as a pedagogue, I have seen a lot of students fumbling with the idea of how to begin a research effort. Academic research includes doctoral programs too. However, this piece of writing particularly refers to the institutional research papers pupils have to conduct under supervision of teachers at the end of honors and masters courses on language and literature.

a) Selecting texts and topics: Students should select the text and topic which they enjoyed most and easily understood during the semesters they have finished. In this regard it should be remembered that students should listen to their own thoughts rather than complying with suggestions by their buddies. Selecting the right text and topic is very important because the appropriate topic can facilitate the student’s proceedings with research work to a large extent. On the other hand, if any student chooses a topic whimsically without precise assessment, he or she will be facing much trouble to move forward. For this reason, students should be able to pick the text and topic they feel confident about and like most.

b) Secondary sources: Students should gather three or four supportive books besides the main text. These additional or supportive books are known as secondary sources when it comes to research. Secondary sources are consulted by students to enhance their ideas about the topic they choose and to extract required citations for enriching the analysis they present in their dissertations. These secondary sources need to be directly connected with the main text so that these things are close enough to the mainstream of the research papers.

c) Online references: During the current era of technological boom, laptops, computers and android phones are found with almost every student. As a result students have grown a compulsive propensity to resort to websites and online sources for finding necessary information for academic purposes. Soft copies of books have in recent times become more popular with students rather than hard copies due to widespread internet connectivity. This is nothing wrong but students need to be aware that citing too many online references may lead to the presumption that perhaps they did not go through the main text seriously.

d) Seeking advice from teachers: Students should have warm attachment with their teachers for exchange of thoughts and notions. Teachers can give effective advice to students about selecting the right topic for thesis work. Students should frankly tell teachers about their choice, convenience and inconvenience. At the same time teachers need to be insightful enough to judge the qualities and limitations of their pupils.

e) Staying connected with supervisors: Students should lay higher emphasis on keeping in touch with their supervisors all the time while taking care of research work. Students should note down supervisors’ cell phone numbers and email address. Moreover, students should consult their supervisors for preparing an outline for their thesis. Students should meet their supervisors frequently to show their problems and progress. If supervisors are too busy, students should seek specific timeframe from them for meeting them at least twice a week.

f) Consulting accomplished dissertations: When students embark on research assignments for the first time, it is very essential for them to go through some research papers and dissertations which were successfully accomplished earlier by their predecessors. Turning over the pages of a completed thesis paper introduces students to the basic features of a research work like how to acknowledge references, how to prepare table of contents, how many chapters to include etc.

g) Total pages: Most of the students often wonder how many pages they should write for their thesis work. Generally at undergraduate level, students are not required to submit thesis papers longer than 40 pages. Simultaneously, it should be noted that it should not be shorter than 30 pages either. So, 30—40 pages refer to a viable length of a tertiary thesis paper.

h) Chapter titles: Supervisors should extend adequate amount of time to their students for conferring advice and guidelines about preparing chapter titles. Each chapter should be explicitly correlated with the thesis topic and the content of each chapter must have similarity with the title.

i) Referential notes: Students must categorically state all the sources from which they quoted citations, phrases, remarks for developing their research work. Quoting something from a text without making specific references to the concerned text or author may lead to plagiarism which is totally prohibited for all sorts of research activity. As far as in-text citations and bibliography are concerned, two styles are prominent in most of the countries: MLA (Modern Language Association) and APA (American Psychological Association). Mixtures of these two styles should be avoided. Footnotes and interpreted transliteration are allowed for referential purposes in required cases.

It must be noted with special care by all concerned that students will have to write their own thesis. Supervisors are not supposed to do the writing job. Students need to get their errors corrected by supervisors and take necessary instructions from them for doing well. When the thesis work is completely written, students should read the entire paper very attentively to understand and remember what they have written and to prepare for defending their analysis when it comes to verbal tests.


Ananda Rahman is a
freelancer and a columnist.