Unfortunately, the dissertation was so time consuming, that since I went back to work full-time on it I had no time to document the process. Now, a few days after the defence, I can write a few lines on that.
Writing the results was a real challenge. I thought an undergraduate dissertation wouldn't give me a chance to feel the water coming up over my neck, but I was wrong. The results were hard for many reasons. On the one hand, they brought the evidence of mistakes in the methodology. I had noticed some while I gathered my data, and managed to fix a few in time; but some others were unforeseeable to me at that time, and "emerged" like ugly warts when I did my data analysis. This is absolutely normal, because this dissertation was my first piece of empirical research ever, and I knew hardly anything about research methods in the field. So, by the time I was close to the end of the dissertation, I knew enough to spot my mistakes (some of them, because I still don't know enough to discover others, I am sure), but nothing could be done to fix them. As a result, there was this "moment of panic" weekend, where I was thinking "oh, my god, this doesn't make any sense!".
The other difficult part of dealing with the results was the fact that I analysed my data from every angle I could think of, and there was a moment when the results were far too many to map in my mind. It took me some days to select the relevant results and construct a story that made some sense with them. Because, at the end of the day, a dissertation is a story; a narration telling that you started off with a sound knowledge on your research topic, you discovered the niche you wanted to occupy in the field of your research, you carefully thought of how you were going to solve the riddles you had in your mind, you went out and proceeded exactly as planned, you analysed your data according to the plan, and you reached your conclusions afterwards. And, well, my dissertation didn't follow a linear path like that. It wasn't a complete mess, but it wasn't exactly as I told it. And I suspect that is true for many other pieces of research, at least among the less experienced like myself.
And, then, the results seemed to go on and on. I had to do a crash course on statistical analysis on the go, which didn't help speed up the work, either. The whole month of May I sat in front of the computer writing the results, and at one moment I thought I wouldn't be able to make it on time, because I didn't want to rush and end up producing something I wasn't happy with. Even if I had tried to be very concise, the methodology and results chapters were long, and my text ended up being a few thousand characters over the limit. Therefore, I had to leave out a whole subsection of the results, and cut as much as I could from the rest.
Another difficult aspect of the dissertation was the extensive reading I had to do in order to cover the topics chosen. When I narrowed down my research topic to autobiographical storytelling, I thought I was going to be fine. Although storytelling is a very wide topic, personal narrative is a manageable sub-category, and I believed I was safe after I chose it. The problem is that the sort of variables I decided to analyse (comprehension, motivation, engagement) belong to very wide research topics in language learning, and it was difficult to learn enough about them in the seven months I spent working on the dissertation. I believe that the most interesting results of the project actually came from the analysis of how those variables interacted among each other, but I pushed myself very close to my limit.
I was also lucky during the process, because some of the decisions I took in the early stages, particularly when I made my experimental design, turned out well, even if I didn't know enough about what I was doing at the time. For example, I decided that I should have different sources of data, like a questionnaire and video recordings. It seemed common sense to me at the time to have additional sources of information to study if one of them went wrong because I had designed it badly, or something went wrong during the activities. I had to take those decisions in January, when I hadn't finished all my reading, and I didn't know enough about research methods in social sciences. Later on I learned that what I called common sense was actually called triangulation in the social sciences. To be completely honest, I think that this sort of luck is the one that goes together with sweat, but chance was partly involved in the results, and it happened to be on my side.
Of course, not all (good and bad) was due to myself and to luck. As for the good, I received a lot of help from others, some known and some unknown. My dissertation and school placement supervisors gave me very useful advice and proofread the document, giving me very valuable feedback. All the teachers in the units of this last year focused on the dissertation, and how they could help us improve our skills to do better through the assignments for their units. The rest of my teachers during the degree have also helped me greatly during the four years, so I could construct my personal map of what education is, and gave me opportunities to train the skills needed to complete the undergraduate dissertation. And, of course, in a degree where most units are based on group work and collective assignments, whatever I have learned was always with the help of my classmates and group-mates. The undergraduate dissertation is an individual piece of work in the last year of your degree, but the resources you use to complete it have been shaped during the previous years in the interaction with others. Well, at least that is the way I have grown to see what learning is, within Vygotsky's sociocultural theory of learning. Internet, on the other hand, gave me the chance to access guidelines and advice on how to tackle an undergraduate dissertation, and that was of great help too.
On the other hand, I decided to go for a formal poster design that would match the general tone of the dissertation, and that made it very easy to prepare. It would have been nice to experiment with more exciting layouts, but considering that my timing was tight, I think I made the right decision.
Finally, regarding computer problems, I was extremely lucky. My computer decided to crash during one of those operating system automatic updates, but thankfully that was two days after I had handed in the final versions of the dissertation and the poster. I spent two days recovering the original OS, updating it manually and recovering some software such as the browser and its plugins and addons, which are essential to open the dissertation document. Honestly, I can't imagine what it would have been like if it had happened a week before.
So, in summary, I think that the undergraduate dissertation has been a very good addition to the degree. It gives you the opportunity to learn new things compared to the rest of units in the degree, and it is of great help to build the researching teacher profile that our university wants to promote, which happens to be the profile I like the most myself. After completing an undergraduate research project, teachers are likely to be better prepared to take part in research projects in collaboration with university researchers and other teachers, and I think that will help improve education in the long run.