 Hi, this is Tracy Takahama-Spinosa, and this is a video about the conclusions section of your action research projects. As you all know, you should have already done your brainstorming about your research question, the things you want to know, the literature review, planned a great methodology section, and completed the analysis. Once you've done all that, you're ready to get into the conclusions. So what we're going to do in this video is consider, you know, what do we mean or what is the definition of the conclusions sections, and what are the parts of that conclusion? So how do you answer the research question? How do you express your findings as well as indicate the limitations and recommendations for future research? And we'll close with a couple of tips. So one of the purposes of the conclusions is to help people understand why your paper is important to them as well. Not just a personal quest on your part, but why it's important for them. And it's not only meant to summarize the information, but offer a global synthesis as well as recommendations for future research. The main purpose of the conclusions section is to answer the research question. So make sure that that's upfront, and probably one of the very first things you do is to return to the research question and make sure you explicitly respond to it. A second thing that you must do in the conclusions that's not really that intuitive is that you have to also let the reader know what you found that you were expecting to find. And not only that, you're also supposed to show them the surprises, the things you didn't expect to find. Oftentimes, that's the most interesting aspect of your paper is the things that you didn't expect you're going to find, which now send you down a whole other path for research. In some countries and in some paper formats, the conclusions section is really just called the discussion section because you're meant to discuss those findings, the things that you expected to find, the things you didn't expect to find and how that now reshapes your vision of the problem or the question that you had at the very beginning. Another key element to the conclusions is to make sure that you indicate the limitations. This is when you get to be your own most critical reader and anticipate what other people might say about your paper. They might say that, well, your methodology wasn't executed completely or maybe your literature was too limited. Make sure that you give yourself that critical look and make sure that you curtail those criticisms by actually indicating them in the limitation to your study. And finally, you close up by responding, taking each one of those limitations and turning it into a recommendation. So if you realize that the scope of your study only looked at kids, for example, in second grade and you realize that's a limitation because you can't generalize it to all primary school kids, then you could mention in your recommendations that in the future you really hope that further research can be done to extend to all primary school grades. That basically is how you write your conclusions. Some ways to go about doing this, a few tips that you might want to consider is don't frame it by saying, you know, in conclusion or in summary, you don't need to use that kind of structured language. Basically, it's more of a show me than tell me kind of a structure. Okay, don't say things that are just overly obvious and make sure that there's a real clear string of ideas that go from your research question all the way down into your conclusions so that you can carry that all the way through. Other things to remember, really good, is that if you have a consistent argument or consistent focus throughout your entire paper, that'd be great. A second point is that while you should acknowledge limitations and make recommendations for future studies, you shouldn't introduce totally new evidence or new information which would require a totally new analysis. So make sure that you don't bring in completely new ideas in the conclusion stage. That doesn't belong there, that would belong when you're discovering the literature and you're framing the focus of the study itself, okay? So don't change the tone of your paper as well. So if you've been formal throughout, stay formal. If you've been relatively informal, stay relatively informal. But don't shift and become sort of high and mighty because it's the conclusions just to make sure that you've maintained your tone of voice throughout. This is especially important because the conclusion says basically the only place where the author's voice does come through in an academic paper so you are allowed to have those opinions there, right? But don't get emotional or don't change the tone so much that it loses the flavor of being an evidence-based academic study. And remember, you have to be really honest with the literature and you have to be honest with what you've ended up finding throughout your research, right? If you thought you were going to find something and you didn't find it if you found something totally different, all you got to really do is be honest about that. You shouldn't apologize. You shouldn't say, oh, I had a bad hypothesis at the beginning because it didn't work out. Basically, the job that you have is to answer the research question and it doesn't matter what the answer is. It doesn't have to be a favorable answer or something you were expecting. It has to be what the evidence says. So be very clear with that and don't lose sight of the purpose of the research process. Don't apologize for what you've found. And whatever you do, don't count it all in terms of, okay, at the end of the day, this is just my personal opinion. It's not. You're basing it on evidence. So do stay true to that. So you are presenting your findings. You are synthesizing the information that you found. You are answering the research question. You're acknowledging the limitations that you might have and you're making an opening for new research in the future. I hope that's clear for you and that you're excited to get to this last stage of your paper. Congratulations on that and look forward to your questions in class.