Ask OASIS Doctoral Resources
Capstone
Find resources to help you begin and progress through your capstone.
Identify Your Capstone Research Problem:
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.
Strategies for the Doctoral Capstone
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4 Strategies to Prepare for Your Doctoral Capstone
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.
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Setting Reasonable Expectations when Starting Capstone
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.
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3 Things I Needed to Complete My Doctoral Capstone
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...
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Choosing a Doctoral Capstone: Where do I Begin?
Having trouble identifying the perfect topic for your doctoral capstone project or dissertation? Well, rest assured that you are not alone.
Interactive Module on Doctoral Writing: Developing Longer Writing Projects
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.
Time Management and the Doctoral Capstone
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Write First, Write Everyday
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...
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Let Go of Your Perfectionism and Finish!
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...
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Start Before You’re Ready: An Exercise in Generative Writing
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.
Doctoral Journeys: Inspiring Stories from Walden Graduates
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Completing the Doctor of Public Health Program
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...
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Completing My Doctoral Capstone
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...
Reviewing the Literature
The Role of the Literature Review
Your literature review gives readers an understanding of the scholarly research on your topic.
In your literature review you will:
- demonstrate that you are a well-informed scholar with expertise and knowledge in the field by giving an overview of the current state of the literature
- find a gap in the literature, or address a business or professional issue, depending on your doctoral study program; the literature review will illustrate how your research contributes to the scholarly conversation
- provide a synthesis of the issues, trends, and concepts surrounding your research
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.
More Resources
Citation Management
Writing the Premise and Prospectus
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.
Interactive Module to Doctoral Writing: Synthesizing the Literature
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.
Writing the Final Study
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.
Preparing for the Form and Style Review
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.