What Differentiates Scholarly Delivery from a Dissertation?
All doctoral programs, whether an Ed.D. or a Ph.D., prepare candidates to apply research skills in the workplace and community. Completing either a dissertation or a scholarly delivery requires intense preparation and a strong foundation in research. Both scholarly delivery and a dissertation present a candidate’s findings and research in support of the candidate for an academic degree.
The difference between the two is that scholarly delivery begins with examination of a problem of practice. The researcher deduces a solution to solve the local problem, but if a practical solution is not available, the research moves into examination of theory and the researcher sets out to prove or disprove theory. The dissertation, on the other hand, begins with theory. The other difference is length.
Scholarly delivery can take many different forms. It may be the writing of software to solve a specific technical problem, or a curriculum designed to solve a specific educational problem. The scholarly deliverables for the WTAMU Ed.D. will be written articles intended for publication. They differ from a dissertation in length, but they still require the highly rigorous research conducted for a dissertation. The two (2) scholarly deliverables for the culmination of the Ed.D. will be publication-ready for scholarly academic journals in the field.
This means that instead of a hundred-page dissertation, the scholarly deliverables for WTAMU’s Ed.D. in EDLD will fit within the page limitations of scholarly journals. The average journal article in EDLD academic journals is between twenty (20) to forty (40) pages.
