Ed.D. CAPSTONE PROJECT MANUAL

CURRY SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

September 2011

Table of Contents

Preface......

Overview of Steps for Capstone Project Requirements......

PART I......

General Suggestions and Expectations......

Examples of Capstone Projects......

Sources of Problems of Practice......

Capstone Components......

Proposal......

Final Project......

Capstone Quality Indicators......

Rating Levels for the Indicators......

Capstone Quality Indicators Checklist......

Using the Indicators......

Writing Style......

Reference Style......

Logistical and Administrative Details for the Capstone Project......

Protection of Human Subjects and the Institutional Review Board Process......

Relationships with Schools and Other Agencies that Provide Data......

Schedule of Tasks and Accomplishments......

Capstone Committee......

Presenting Drafts to Committee Members......

Students’, Capstone Project Chairs’, and Committee Members’ Responsibilities......

Attendance at and Participation in Proposal and Project Defenses......

Archiving......

Capstones and Publication......

Additional Resources......

Exceptions to Capstone Project Guidelines and Regulations......

PART II......

Answers to Common Questions......

1. When should I start thinking about my capstone project?......

2. What should I do to prepare for my capstone?......

3. Who should be my capstone project chair?......

4. Who should be on my capstone project committee?......

5. What are the elements of a good capstone project proposal?......

6. How can I find good examples to follow for my proposal and capstone project?......

7. Are proposal and capstone project proposal defenses open to the public?......

8. What are the expectations for a capstone project proposal defense?......

9. What should I do if I have not successfully defended my capstone project proposal ?......

10. What should I do if my capstone project proposal is accepted with minor revisions?......

11. What is expected of me before, during, and after data collection?......

12. What if I must modify my research?......

13. What are my responsibilities in writing the capstone project?......

14. What should my capstone project chair and committee do regarding my manuscript?......

15. What else should I expect of my capstone project chair and committee?......

16. What should my capstone project chair and committee expect of me?......

17. What should I expect at my capstone project defense?......

18. What should I do if I do not defend my capstone project successfully?......

19. When may I participate in a graduation?......

PART III......

Guidelines for Manuscript Preparation......

Formatting......

Pagination......

Footnotes/Endnotes (see APA manual)......

References (see APA manual)......

Capstone Project Pages – Order and Numbering Sequence......

PART IV......

Post-Capstone Project Defense Checklist......

Paper Submission......

Digital Submission......

Both Forms of Submission......

1

Preface

These guidelines are intended to give both doctoral students and faculty members at the Curry School of Education a description of procedures and expectations that will make the Ed.D. capstone process easier, more predictable, and more successful. Departments or programs in the Curry School may add to the requirements or guidelines as they see fit – as long as they are no less demanding than the ones set forth in this document.Nothing in these guidelines is intended to conflict with statements in the University Record.

Part Iprovides general suggestions,examples, and resources that will help students write better proposals and projects and help faculty members provide better guidance and feedback to their advisees. It also describes the various components of the capstone proposal and project.

Part II is intended to answer students’ questions, although faculty members may find it helpful as well. It is organized around common questions about the capstone process. It amplifies the suggestions of Part I and ties them to specific issues and procedures described elsewhere. Any questions not answered by these guidelines should be directed to the Curry School of Education’sDirector of Doctoral Studies.

Part III provides guidelines for the preparation of capstone project manuscripts and examples of properly formatted pages and components.

Part IV is the post-capstone project checklist.

Overview of Steps for Capstone Project Requirements

  1. Delimit an area of interest.
  1. Find a capstone projectchair appropriate to your area of interest.
  1. With the chair, form an Ed.D. capstone committee.
  1. Confer with your chair and committee to develop your proposal.
  1. With the chair’s consent, determine a date and time when all committee members can attend the capstone proposal defense.
  1. Submit an announcement to the Curry School of Education’s Admissions and Student Affairs Office two weeks prior to the date of the defense and distribute the capstone project proposal to the committee members.
  1. Defend your capstone project proposal.
  1. After a successful defense, submit Institutional Review Board (IRB)forms for approval, if appropriate.
  1. After receiving IRB approval, conduct your study by collecting and analyzing data according to your research design.
  1. Work closely with your chair and relevant committee memberswhile writingthe capstone project.
  1. With the chair’s consent, determine a date and time when all committee members can attend the capstone project defense.
  1. Submit an announcement to the Curry School of Education’s Admissions and Student Affairs Officetwo weeks prior to the date of the capstone project defense and distribute the capstone project to the committee members.
  1. Defend your capstone project.
  1. Incorporate edits pursuant to your committee’s recommendations.
  1. Submit the final copy of the approved capstone project to the Admissions Office, Curry School of Educationbefore the specified deadline for a given graduation date (see Schedule, p. 13).
  1. Take your project to the Alderman Copy Center, deposit a print copy in the University library, and provide all committee members who want a copy with one.

PART I

General Suggestions and Expectations

The goal of an Ed.D. program is to prepare practitioner-scholars, individuals who meet a set of expectations distinct from those forscholars, on the one hand, and practitioners on the other. Scholars develop and disseminate knowledge. Practitioner-scholars draw on the knowledge, skills, and understanding that they have acquired in the course of their doctoral studies to examine and address a significant problem of practice.

A capstone project is intended to be of direct benefit to practitioners and, ultimately, the public. It is also a demonstration of a student’s ability to carry out disciplined inquiry and argumentation in accordance with Curry’s standards of performance, which should prepare students to be leaders in their fields.

Through the project, students should demonstrate the capacity to:

  • Consider problems of practice from perspectives other than those derived from their own experience and early training.
  • Challenge prevailing assumptions and beliefs about teaching, learning, leadership, and what it means to be a professional in a democratic society.
  • Make sound, defensible, research-based judgments regarding how current practices can be undertaken more effectively and efficiently.
  • Apply skills of practical inquiry in a rigorous and systematic way to address problems of practice. Such skills should include, but not be limited to, locating and framing problems; acquiring, organizing, and analyzing information; and planning, implementing, and evaluating decisions.
  • Develop recommendations regarding practices, programs, and/or policies.
  • Take into consideration the needs of specific individuals and the characteristics of particular contexts.
  • Effectively communicate the results to appropriate audiences.

Examples of Capstone Projects

Students undertake capstone projects to improve practice by solving problems andcontributing to improved organizational or professional performance. To do this, they inquire into and analyze the nature and dimensions of a problem and establish that there is a difference between the present and the ideal state, then build a case for improvements and make persuasive recommendations for action. Such disciplined inquiry may draw upon qualitative and/or quantitative research techniques.

Once students identify their problem(s), they may employ several possible forms of disciplined inquiry—for example needs analysis, program evaluation or process analysis, program development and design, organizational diagnosis, organizational development, policy analysis, impact evaluation,or cost-benefit analysis.

Here are some examples:

Format / Problem / Guiding Question
Program evaluation/ process analysis / Staff are dissatisfied with the supervision process at West Middle School / How close is the supervision process to an ideal program, and how can it be improved?
Program development and design / There is poor freshman-to-sophomore retention of at-risk students at U-Name-It University / Does the transitional summer improve students’ chances of success, and how might it be modified to be more effective?
Organizational development / The organizational culture and structure of North High School is a barrier to individualizing instruction for students / What can be done to facilitate the implementation of Response to Intervention (RTI) in the high school?
Policy analysis / East Division’s ninth-grade students are struggling in the transition to high school / How can the challenges associated with the transition from middle school to high school be addressed through better policies?
Cost-benefit analysis / West Division is considering alternativesto the existing community-education program / What would be the most cost-effective way to preserve high-quality community-education programming?

Sources of Problems of Practice

A capstone problem of practice may be identified in one of two ways:

1)The student identifies a problem through independent data analysis and/or consultation with a field organization andpresents it for approval as a capstoneproposal.

2)The student responds to a field-based organization’s request for assistance by developing a capstone proposal.

Capstone Components

The following components will be included in each capstone project. Program areas may make a formal proposal to the Faculty Council to use an alternative structure, with a clear description of the required components of the alternative; once approved, it will become an appendix in the manual.

Proposal

Problem of practice. Practicing professionals are besieged with problems that require current information, new understanding, and workplace skills for the development and implementation of solutions. Capstone projects are designed to serve this need; they are grounded in the field and privilege professional as well as academic knowledge.

Students need to describe the problem(s) identified through an analysis of an organizational situation; show how the problem is grounded in the organization’s context and culture; recount the causes and evolution of the problem; and describe their role, if any, in the organization and how it relates to the problem. They then articulate reasons for addressing the problem and show that it can be solved using research and professional knowledge.

Literature review. A good review of the literature has the following characteristics: It

  • focuses on important research on a well-delineated topic, and
  • makes sense of the scholarly conversation pertinent to the capstone topic, delineating what is known about that topic and what needs to be known.

A complete review of the important literaturerequires electronic searches through databases, as well as hand searches through journals, books, and other materials. It sometimes requires contacting researcherswho are working on the same or similar topics; researchers must not work in isolation or assume that whatever has been published is the most current available information. A good review describes the methods of search used to find the relevant literature.

A good review separates sound from unsound research; it may ignore or mention studies of little or no merit, but it gives disproportionate attention to those with the best designs and the most defensible conclusions and explains legitimate differences in the findings and/or opinions of researchers. Studies that have undergone rigorous peer review are typically, but not always, more trustworthy than are those that have not, but peer review is imperfect—sometimes, reviewers recommend for publication studies that contain serious methodological flaws or misinterpretations.

Good reviews may be organized in a variety of ways. Some are chronological, following the development of an idea over time. Others are topical, bringing together disparate ideasin meaningful ways. All lead the reader through a thicket of information and arrive at conclusions that are logical and supported by reliable evidence.A good review is coherent, evaluative, and forward-looking.

Conceptual framework.A good conceptual framework is a lens through which the various aspects of the inquiry are brought into focus and relationship. If a capstone project examines the implementation of a middle school mathematics program, for instance, the narrative might explain that the program is based on a conceptual model of how learning occurs: by scaffolding student learning through repeated formative assessments. The problem may be that students are not learning what they need to know. The research might then focus on how teacher behaviors conform to that model and on the results they obtain. Once the student has provided a picture of how the program is currently implemented and analyzed its results based on the data collected, action recommendations follow.

Methodology. The research design, whether qualitative or quantitative or both, should be appropriate to the question(s) being asked. The required research courses shouldhave enabled thestudent to know the difference between designsthat are appropriate and those that are not, between strong and weak data analyses, and between justifiable and unjustifiable conclusions.

An adequate research design for a capstone project allows students proposing research to:

  • specify the problem being addressed;
  • explain why solving it is important for practice;
  • explain why this research strategy—informed by field experience, the conceptual framework, and knowledge from the literature review—is the best way to collect the data that will inform the recommendations;
  • identify any ethical concerns in applying the methodology;
  • explain the data-collection procedures and why they are workable; and
  • explain how they will analyze the data.

Final Project

Capstone project findings are presented at the defense through the following written components. They describe how the problem was identified, investigated, and analyzed, as well as how it can be solved.

Study description.The study description reworks the material from the proposal in light of the subsequent execution of the study. This includes the problem description, the relevant scholarly literature, the conceptual framework, and the data-collection procedures and tools (quantitative or qualitative), all aligned with the question(s) under investigation.All data-collection tools (interviews, instruments, observation guides) are included as an appendix to this component of the capstone.

Position paper. In the second component, the student presents and analyzes the data collected, argues the relative merits of possible solutions, recommends and justifies which actions to take, and notes the implications of those recommendations for the set of action communications.

Action communications. The third component consists of a set of action communications, whose format, style, and content will vary according to the analysis of the problem and the nature of the recommended actions. The student explains, for each action communication, its audience(s), intended purpose(s), and relationship to the recommended actions. The action communications should be accompanied by an explanation of how they should be deployed and/or guidance for their presentation. This completes the capstone project’s cycle of inquiry into the selected problem of practice.

Executive summary. The executive summary provides an overview of the project’s purposes and results.

Capstone Quality Indicators

The committee uses the capstone quality indicator checklistto evaluate both thecapstone proposal and final project. The focus at the proposal defense is on the study description; at the final project defense, the committee considers the study description as well as the position paper, action communications, and executive summary.

Students need to be sure they understand the indicators before they begin drafting the proposal. The indicators are presented in an order that reflects the general format of most capstone projects; thus students should attend particularly to the initial quality indicators when developing a proposal. Obviously, all the indicators are important as the full capstone project is drafted.

Rating Levels for the Indicators

Each member of the capstone committee evaluates the presentation and written document according to the following rating levels:

Acceptable.A designation of acceptablemeans that a given aspect of the capstone proposal or project requires no further revision. In the case of capstone proposals, this means that the project may proceed as proposed. In the case of final projects, faculty members are strongly encouraged to elaborate on this rating for high-quality projects in the comments sections that follow each category.

Minor revision necessary. This designationmeans that although this aspect of the proposal or completed project needs some correction, elaboration, or other improvement, it does meet a minimal standard of quality. At the proposal stage, this indicates that the student must make improvements, but the project may proceed. The chair of the committee, in consultation with the other committee members, decides on a deadline for the written changes. At a final defense,this rating means that although some revision of the project manuscript is necessary, the project passes.The chair of the committee, in consultation with other committee members, decides on a deadline for the written changes.

Major revision necessary. Any aspect of the project that receives a rating of major revision necessary does not meet a minimal standard of quality and must be corrected. At the proposal stage, the project cannot proceed until the student addresses the concerns. At the final project defense, this rating means that the issue must be corrected before the student passes.

Capstone Quality Indicators Checklist

Proposal and Final Capstone Project / Acceptable / Minor Revision Necessary / Major Revision Necessary
  1. Writing
The student has
written the capstone project in a professional manner.
committed few or no grammatical, spelling, or typographical errors.
structured the study in accordance with Curry guidelines.
given attribution when using or citing the work of others and followed the APA or another acceptable reference format.
Comments:
  1. Presentation
The student has
been clear and concise in the oral presentation.
created handouts or multimedia presentations that enhance, rather than detract from, this clarity.
demonstrateda clear understanding of the topic, the relevant literature, and all aspects of the capstone project in the presentation and interaction with committee members (and/or the audience).
presented the capstone project in a professional manner.
Comments:
  1. ProBlem(s) of Practice
The student has
clearly described the problem and defined important and relevant concepts.
made a convincing case for the importance of the problem to practitioners.
examined the problem in light of contextual concerns.
given a convincing rationale for addressing the problem.
shown that there is a reasonable likelihood that the problem has been or could be addressed successfully.
Comments:
4. literature reviewand Conceptual Framework
The student has
focused on the important research on a well-defined topic.
clearly explained what is and is not known about theissuerepresented by this particular problem of practice.
guided the inquiry according to a coherent and relevant conceptual framework.
Comments:
  1. Format and Methodology
The student has
chosen a format for inquiry that is appropriate to the question(s) posed.
described in detail workable procedures for data collection.
chosen appropriate data-collection tools (e.g., instruments, interview or observation guides) and described themin detail.
consideredany ethical concerns and/or possible negative consequences of applying the methodology.
Comments:
Final Capstone Project Only / Acceptable / Minor Revision Necessary / Major Revision Necessary
6. position paper
The student has
summarized the results clearly and shown how the analysis informs the recommendations.
built a rigorous, informed, and evidence-based argument regarding the solution(s).
made recommendations that are appropriate to the particular practice context.
spelled out the implications of the findings for further action and/or research.
acknowledged what might impede implementation of the recommendations
Comments:
7. Action communications
The student has
addressed the relevant audiences in ways that help them understand the problem and its proposed solution(s).
included a coherent narrative about how they should be deployed and presented.
Comments:
8. Executive Summary
The student has
presented the overall projectclearly and succinctly.
Comments:

Using the Indicators

These indicators can be used as a guide for students as they develop and write their capstone projects, as a feedback mechanism for faculty as they work with students, and as a means of structuring questions and discussion at proposal and project defenses. Potential uses are delineated for each participant at different stages in the process.