Research Proposal Plan Outline
- Title (signpost your intention to the reader)
- Introduction(c800-1000 words)
Explicitly introduce your proposal to the reader, what will they find inside it.- Background to the study, including a statement of the problem (can be personal) your context and situate yourself in this context
- Aims of the study.
- Preliminary Review of the literature (brief narrative summary) including relevant educational theory. Highlight the gap in the literature that your study addresses. Brief outline of your literature review
- Your rationale for the study – and outline of relevance to your context.
- Specific and achievable research question(s) or in some cases a hypothesis
- Proposed Methodology of the study (c800-1000 words)
- Overview of study design including theoretical basis for your researcher decisions and the chosen research approach
- Description of setting and educational context and how you have identified your participants
- Sampling strategy, sample size, selection and recruitment
- Data source and data collection procedures
- Data management and analysis procedures
- Strategies for ensuring quality and rigour.
- Ethics (approximately c500 words)
- Discuss any important ethical issues and how they will be managed.
- Logistics (250 words)
- Briefly outline the anticipated timetable using a Gantt Chart.
- Possible limitations and or risks to the conduct of the project.
- Significance and impact (200 words)
- Summarise the outputs and potential benefits of the project e.g. what contribution will your study make to the field of knowledge? To policy and practice? What are the wider implications of your study? In particular, outline how the methodology achieves the research aim, and how the outputs potentially address the research problem (alignment).
- Bibliography (not included in the word count)
Ensure that you demonstrate the depth of your engagement with research methodology literature. There is an expectation that you will have undertaken some self-directed learning i.e. beyond the essential readings for the module and relevant to your argument
