'independent inquiry and the undergraduate dissertation: perceptions and experiences of final year social science students', assessment and evaluation in higher education, vol. Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. I have been fortunate to have had the responsibility for running the final year undergraduate dissertation module for the applied social studies programme at sheffield hallam university and also to have supervised a number of final year projects in recent years. Managing this module and working with these students has been very helpful to me in working on developing this resource.

This site was inspired by my own research into the staff and student experience of the undergraduate final year project when, in 2002 2003, i received a teaching fellowship from sheffield hallam university. I have drawn upon this research to influence the design and content of this resource. I would like to thank those staff and students who participated in the research and sheffield hallam university for providing me with the space and resource to do so. The final year dissertation hst398 or hst399 should be one of the most fulfilling and rewarding projects you undertake here, where you come of age as a historian and draw together all of your historical and transferable skills in the process of sustained research.

The dissertation is also the element of the history curriculum most firmly grounded in independent and inquiry based learning. Now, at level three, you will continue to be able to draw upon the skills and resources developed last year and to work in close association with your chosen supervisor, but you will also still have the opportunity to join forces with fellow students in order to pursue your independent lines of inquiry with collegial support. dissertation support groups the idea is to encourage all those who wish to to join together in groups of 3 5 for the purpose of offering one another support and feedback while working on your dissertations. These informal dissertation support groups can then meet at times and places of your choosing in order to discuss some of the issues you may be confronting in the process of research, as well as to provide extra feedback at certain crucial stages of the programme. Ideally, you would find people to work with in your special or further subject groups if you are unable to, then please get in touch with me, , and i will try to match you up with other students in a similar situation.

You can also bounce ideas off one another, and of course at times it is simply helpful to have someone to draw upon for encouragement and general good will. Organisationally, you may find that certain issues and questions can be dealt with via email, while at other times you prefer to hold a meeting. It would in any case be advisable to meet twice a semester in order to check in, and to share results and update one another on progress more often as you wish. Feel free to be informal, and to choose a place and time where you can relax and feel comfortable as well as get some productive work done together. In any event, it would be a good idea to schedule such a meeting in the week or two before handing in proposals/synopses, and before handing in drafts/final drafts, in order to get feedback from one another in a process of peer review. the process of peer review here you will be able to get together with a partner within your support group to look over one another's drafts of the synopsis or later on the dissertation, and then offer helpful comments. This is not just to catch typos and points of grammar but rather more to engage with the argument, evidence and structure presented in the essay draft or partial draft and detailed outline.

Special downloadable forms are available to help you with this process: one for essay drafts and one for topics and synopses. You are still working with your own distinct ideas and conducting independent research, but as part of a network of other researchers rather than in isolation mdash just as professional historians do. As long as you do not rewrite parts of one another s drafts, borrow large sections and ideas wholesale, or duplicate parts of the same work in separate dissertations, you should be able to stay on the ethical side of the collusion line without too much difficulty. For a statement of the department policy on plagiarism and collusion, see the following link: you may also find that reading and commenting on your partner s draft will enable you to come back to your own with a more keenly critical eye when you go through those last stages of editing and revising before handing in. The standard practice would be to exchange drafts with one other person in pairs, but should you find yourself in a group with an odd number of members, you can form a triangular exchange among three colleagues. You should look at drafts in the week before easter unless you know you can do so over the break , in order to have enough time to respond to comments before the deadline. Short dissertationists may choose to look at drafts in the week before leaving for easter, or immediately upon your return the deadline being a week later.

Last updated: 9 may 2012 recently the guardian professional higher education network ran a poll asking is the end of the dissertation nigh?. Yet this suggests that a quarter of the voters thought the dissertation had had its day. From the many conversations i have had over the last year, while directing a two year national teaching fellowship funded project on rethinking final year undergraduate projects and dissertations: creative honours and capstone projects. It is clear that that an increasing number of people in higher education are questioning whether the traditional dissertation is fit for purpose. For the last half century or more the final year undergraduate dissertation, typically an 8 10,0 word independent project, has been seen as the gold standard for british higher education.

However, it is coming under pressure for reform as student participation rates have increased, the number studying professional disciplines has grown, and staff student ratios have deteriorated. Some courses have abandoned the dissertation altogether, but there is a danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water. How can the most important learning outcomes associated with the traditional final year project largely be retained, while giving students a range of other benefits which are more relevant to their interests and future careers? on june 22nd 2011, over 100 colleagues met at the university of gloucestershire in cheltenham to discuss these issues. What struck me most was the wide range of views on diversifying the traditional dissertation, the forms it might take and the issues which arise in making such changes. These reflected disciplinary differences in what counts as research and inquiry and how knowledge is created and disseminated, but also pinpointed differences in institutional practices and individual viewpoints. However, the large majority of people seemed open to change, but had concerns about how they could persuade their colleagues.