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Voices from Across the Curriculum

I tell my students that too many papers “just end,” as if the last page or so were missing. I tell them the importance of ending a work. One could summarize main points, but I tell them this is not heavy lifting.

I believe the ending should be an expansion of possibilities, sort of like an introduction to some much larger “mental” paper out there. I sometimes encourage students to see the concluding section as an option to introduce ideas that can’t be dealt with now. Sort of a “Having done this, I would want to explore boom, boom, boom if I were to continue further.” Here the students can critique and recommend (“Having seen ‘this,’ one wonders ‘that’”).

—Frederick Norling, Professor of Business

The conclusion does not appear simply as a restatement of a thesis, but rather as an attempt to draw out its implications and significance (the “So what?”). This is what I usually try to impress upon students. For instance, if a student is writing on a particular proposal for party reform, I would expect the concluding paragraph to consider both the significance of the reform and its practicality.

I should note that professional papers oft en indicate the tentativeness of their conclusions by stressing the need for future research and indicating what these research needs might be. Although I haven’t tried this, maybe it would be useful to have students conclude papers with a section entitled “For Further Consideration” in which they would indicate those things that they would have liked to have known but couldn’t, given their time constraints, the availability of information, and lack of methodological sophistication. This would serve as a reminder of the tentativeness of conclusions and the need to revisit and revise arguments in the future (which, aft er all, is a good scholarly habit).

—Jack Gambino, Professor of Political Science

CONCLUSIONS IN THE SCIENCES: THE DISCUSSION SECTION

As is the case with introductions, the conclusions of reports written in the natural and in some social sciences are regulated by formalized disciplinary formats. Conclusions, for example, occur in a section entitled “Discussion.” There, the writer analyzes conclusions and qualifies them in relation to some larger experimental context, “the big picture.”

First, specific results are interpreted (but not restated), and then their implications and limitations are discussed. At the end, the writer should rephrase the original research question and discuss it in light of the results presented. It is at this point that alternative explanations may be considered and new questions posed.

Writing Conclusions in the Sciences: Two Professors Speak

In the following Voices from Across the Curriculum, a psychology professor and a biochemistry professor explain how the discussion section of a scientific paper locates its conclusions in the context of other research—that which came before and that which will follow.

Voices from Across the Curriculum

The conclusion occurs in a section labeled “Discussion” and, as specified by the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, is guided by the following questions:

What have I contributed here?

How has my study helped to resolve the original problem?

What conclusions and theoretical implications can I draw from my study?

In a broad sense, a particular research report should be seen as but one moment in a broader research tradition that preceded the particular study being written about and that will continue aft er this study is published. And so the conclusion should tie this particular study into both previous research considering implications for the theory guiding this study and (when applicable) practical implications of this study. One of the great challenges of writing a research report is thus to place this particular study within that broader research tradition. Th at’s an analytical task.

—Alan Tjeltveit, Professor of Psychology

The Discussion section is where the scientist finally gets to analyze the data. The previous