I’ve read a paper today – “Experience Report: Peer Instruction in Introductory Computing”. It’s about use of clickers in CS courses: a clarification of someone’s prior work, concentrating on question development and typical results (student participation and understanding improved).
The interesting question from reading this was a bit unexpected. It wasn’t about how I can use this on my own project (answer to that is – perhaps a fleeting reference) it was about the scope of my project.
The paper has everything: abstract, introduction, review of prior work, experiment setup, description of limitations, interesting observations from running the experiment, analysis of the results (including statistics), followup surveys, recommendations, conclusion, and references.
That’s all fine, the problem is that the entire thing is 5 pages long – that includes everything. I’m supposed to write 40 pages of solid text for my dissertation. having read this paper and guesstimated at the amount of work that went into it – I was concerned that I would either need to fill my 40 pages with fluff, or take on a much more exhausting, full-time project.
But Greg assured me that this paper was made so short because of the publisher’s limitation, and the authors had to keep many things out of it. That’s why it’s exactly 5 pages, not a single blank line in the end. Hopefully he’s right and my new worries are not founded.