Doctoral Resources
Find resources to help you begin and progress through your capstone.
Harnessing Your Motivation to Bypass Writer’s Block
Tap into your motivation, access what you already know, and consider where you might need more information. Finalizing your research problem is an important step in your doctoral journey, and this tutorial will help you get there.
Identify Your Capstone Research Problem
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Savvy Student Blog
You’ve likely heard many references to the final ‘capstone project,’ the dissertation or doctoral study that will be the culmination of your work as a doctoral student.
Read Capstone Blog
When you reach the capstone phase of your program, I hope you pause and celebrate - take the time to congratulate yourself on becoming “All but dissertation.
Read Expectations Blog
Are you worried about the challenge of the dissertation or capstone process? If so, then you are not alone. When I started, I was unaware of all the considerations...
Read Success Blog
Having trouble identifying the perfect topic for your doctoral capstone project or dissertation? Well, rest assured that you are not alone.
Read Starting Capstone Blog
As you progress through your program, you will take on longer and more complex writing projects, which will require more thoughtful planning, greater collaboration with your faculty, and more revision than you may be used to.
DEVELOPING LONGER WRITING PROJECTS
Two suggestions will come up again and again: write first, and write every day. Today, I’d like to think through how that advice might apply to Walden students...
Read Writing Blog
Even if you wouldn’t consider yourself a perfectionist, generally speaking (have you seen the state of my laundry piles?), perfectionist thoughts and tendencies have a b...
Read Perfectionism Blog
Would you like to produce better writing in less time? The key is to start writing before you feel like you are ready or certain of what to say.
Read Generative Writing Blog
Like many others, you may like to know how it feels to have completed the doctoral degree, what experiences I can share, how long it look, etc. I will try to addre...
Read DPH Blog
I graduated with a PhD in Psychology with a focus on Educational Psychology from Walden in 2017. I suppose I’ll start by answering the most common q...
Read PhD Capstone Blog
Your literature review gives readers an understanding of the scholarly research on your topic.
In your literature review you will:
We want to help you maintain the vision of the big picture. It’s easy to lose sight of this when you’re doing your research, following various threads of interest, sometimes getting bogged down in the details. The literature review is not a comprehensive history of your topic, but a way to provide context to your reader about research that has preceded your study.
Be aware that the literature review is an iterative process. As you read and write initial drafts, you will find new threads and complementary themes, at which point you will return to search, find out about these new themes, and incorporate them into your review.
The purpose of this guide is to help you through the literature review process. Take some time to look over the resources in order to become familiar with them. The tabs on the left side of this page have additional information.
Library guide to Capstone Literature Reviews
Checklist for Exhausting the Literature
Part of becoming an independent academic writer means knowing the skills you need to develop in your writing process as well as the resources available to help you develop them. The time you spend working with faculty to develop your preproposal document(s) is also a perfect opportunity to reflect on your writing skills and what further work you need to do to prepare yourself to write the proposal and final study.
Preproposal Starter Kit
As you develop your research proposal, you'll read the scholarship surrounding the focus of your research, and you'll need to synthesize what you find in a literature review.
Synthesizing the Literature
Working on the final study means that the committee has approved a doctoral student’s proposal, Walden IRB has approved the application to conduct the study, and the student has collected data. At this stage, students are ready to begin writing the final chapters/sections of the capstone. All Walden capstones, whether from professional programs or PhD programs, cover five main areas: introduction, literature review (or the background and context, for students doing a DNP project), research method/design, analysis/findings, and conclusions/applications/implications for social change. Every student should check his or her program checklist or rubric for specific content guidance, as different programs vary in the required number of chapters or sections in the final capstone document.
This kit will help students more specifically with how to describe the results, format tables and figures to display findings, discuss social change, and reflect on the research process and conclusions.
Final Study Kit
These resources are for doctoral students who have completed their final doctoral capstone documents and are preparing them for final approval prior to graduation.
This kit focuses on what doctoral students need as they prepare for the form and style (F&S) review. It includes information on what the editors check for at the F&S stage, common errors and how to revise them, the checklists and how to use them, and resources for double-checking references and citations.
Form and Style Review Kit
OASIS