thesis, anyone?

For most master's and doctor's degrees, one culminates the studies with a paper.  Since high schools and colleges also have senior paper requirements, what's the difference?  Answer: as far as I know, not that much.  The hallmark of the academic paper is giving sources.  The old time way to do that was with footnotes, which often made use of a little Latin.  If I wish to tell you that I got some information from p. 103 of a book written in cooperation by 4 authors, the footnote said: main author et al, title, p.103.  The "et al." meant main author and others.  Modern software can make the business of creating and editing footnotes much faster and easier than the old method.

The newer way of creating footnotes is often referred to as "APA style", for American Psychological Association.  That style inserts a little source information right in the text instead of asking the reader to interrupt the reading by looking at the foot of the page.  In the APA style, I write (main author et al., p.103), which tells the reader to check the references listed after the text for the main author's name in alphabetical order for the title, other authors, publisher and date of the book or other source of my information.  Many non-academic readers are turned off by the appearance of footnotes or intra-line reference information but it really helps when checking if someone really said what is quoted or stated.  The thesis or dissertation is read by one's advisor and by the orals committee.  A person would be foolish to make up quotes so it is highly likely the quote is accurate.  But reading near the quote may shed light on the context of the statement quoted and assist in understanding the statement or its limitations and implications.

For those trying to decide on a thesis (master's) or dissertation (doctorate), the list of references may be meat to a tiger.  A quick glance at the introduction to the paper may tell what the author of another paper or book found, thinks and predicts but the list of references may contain gold in the form of ideas or doubts or hunches that the author missed and that could be used for one's own thesis or dissertation.

My dissertation was written in 1968 and is titled "An Application of Decision Theory to Education".  About a year before finishing the paper, I read an example of a research paper in Siegel's "Non-Parametric Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences" (1956).  He discussed experiments in decision-making that seemed to me that they might form the basis of a game or simulation that could improve the training of educational administrators such as principals and superintendents.  If you would like to see the paper, look at this page on my web site.