Select a topic for your thesis or dissertation. Your instructor will provide you with information on any criteria that you must follow to select a topic, such as a particular field that the topic must focus upon. Your topic does not have to focus solely on math or science. Numerous areas of research, however, will use math or science materials to support the topic.
Conduct research on the topic, using scholarly materials. The Internet, local library or school library will have a wide selection of scholarly materials on almost any topic. Scholarly material is simply research conducted by scholars or academics in their field of specialization. Scholarly material related to math and science in various fields serves to provide statistics and scientific experimentation that focuses on a topic.
Develop a question for your research that you want to answer. For example, "Are girls or boys more successful in fourth grade?" Then develop a thesis statement for your research. The thesis statement clarifies what you believe the answer to the question will be and why you think this is so.
Discuss, in writing, each piece of scholarly material that you have found in your research to either support your thesis, show arguments against your thesis and develop a basis for your own analysis of the topic. This includes your math and science research, which will allow you to quote the findings of experiments or the statistics that have been calculated from scholars about your topic. For example, if you believe that girls are more successful in fourth grade than boys and find statistics from scholarly research that support your claim, use those statistics in your literature review, ensuring that you quote your source. However, if you also find scholarly research with statistics that indicates that boys are more successful in fourth grade, you must also use those numbers to prove that there is not a universal conclusion drawn on the topic.