ORI3900 Bachelor Thesis Course description

Individual home exam over five days. Scope: 3,800-4,200 words.

Resit exam: Students who are awarded the grade F on the home exam have the right to submit a reworked version once.

All aids are permitted, as long as the rules for source referencing are complied with.

Grade scale A-F.

Work and teaching methods include lectures, seminars, supervision, group work and self-study. The course starts with lectures that will support the students’ work on the chosen subject, formulating the research questions and the project outline.

The bachelor’s thesis is normally written individually or in pairs. If the project’s topic is interprofessional, the project group can also include a student from another bachelor's degree programme, subject to the approval of the person responsible for the course at both programmes.

Students will meet at seminars during the project period. Halfway into the project, the students will meet to present their preliminary project status and provide input to fellow students on their projects. The students are assigned a supervisor after they have submitted a project outline describing the topic of the thesis. The supervision is based on written project material and specific questions submitted by the student(s) ahead of the supervision session. Students with an individual assignment are given four supervision sessions and group assignments are given six sessions.

The course covers quantitative and qualitative research methods that are relevant to prosthetics and orthotics. The students will learn about research design, data collection and analysis and research ethics. The themes reliability, construct validity and internal and external validity as a basis for critical reading of research articles and other sources will be emphasised. These themes are followed up in subsequent courses and provide the students with a basis for their work on the bachelor’s thesis at the end of the programme.

The student must have passed the first year of the programme or equivalent.

After completing the course, the student should have the following learning outcomes defined in terms of knowledge, skills and general competence:

Knowledge

The student

• can explain different types of research design
• has knowledge of the use of systematic literature reviews and relevant quantitative research methods (RCT, repeated measures, cross-sectional etc.)
• can describe interviews as a qualitative research method and other qualitative research methodology
• can explain hypothesis testing, credibility, reliability, validity, normal distribution, p-value and probability calculation
• can describe univariate and bivariate statistical methods

Skills

The student

• can collect and analyse quantitative individual data, both descriptive and inferential, from questionnaires/experiments/statistics
• can collect and analyse qualitative individual data
• can reflect on the collection and analysis of individual data
• can present analysis results
• can search for research articles and other sources and take a critical approach when reading them

General competence

The student

• can identify potential research ethical issues in research articles

Grade scale A-F.

Portfolio assessment:

Part 1) Individual written home exam, 750 words (+/- 10 %)

Part 2) Group assignment: Written assignment in groups of 2-3 students. Scope of 2,500 words (+/- 10 %).

Weighting: One overall grade is awarded based on the portfolio. Both assignments in the portfolio count equally with respect to grading, but if an F is awarded for one of the assignments, the overall grade will also be an F.

Resit exam: Students will be given one opportunity to submit a reworked version of the portfolio assignment(s) for which an F was awarded.

• 15 credits overlap with the course ORTO3900 Bachelor Assignment.