Introduction to Research

 

Goal: To produce a professional research proposal that would warrant funding through a government or private agency.

 

Note: This assignment is unique in the CLS program. You have come up with a research question. Now, you need to communicate that idea and convince a committee that the question is so important that they should give you money to supply the answer.

The tone of this paper is very formal, no grammatical, spelling or punctuation errors are allowed in the final paper. Read the entire assignment carefully.

 

Structure:

 

1. The student will write a proposal (12 -15 pages) that contains the skeletal structure outlined below. The page margins will be approximately 1 in. X 1 in. and the proposal will be double spaced using the Arial size 12 font. APA format will be used for citing references.
2. Use APA style citations in the text and for the reference page. Don’t quote extended portions of other papers, paraphrase.
3. Only the literature review section of your paper is past tense. The rest is future tense.
4. Your proposal must be saved in .doc format with the title:

YourLastname_ResearchProposal

            For example: My proposal would be titled: Tiefenback_Research Proposal

5. All writing in the report should be IN YOUR OWN WORDS. You will submit your final paper to Turn-It-In plagiarism software for evaluation of the originality of the work. Any paper with a similarity index of greater than 25% will not be accepted for grading
6. References must be primary sources (at least 10 references less than 5 years old) must be synthesized to describe the current state of knowledge regarding the topic. Your sources should be from peer reviewed journals. Do not use secondary sources like textbooks, encyclopedias, sites like WebMD.

 

Outline of proposal:

The skeleton of your proposal is in the syllabus and below:

Clearly label each part.

 

Research proposal grading:

Content                                                                                                                                  Points

 

Title Page                                                                                                                               _25_

 

Acknowledgements                                                                                                                              _25_

 

1. Abstract                                _100_
   1. Summarizing your topic of research
   2. Data collection (what and how)
   3. Data analysis (how)
   4. Expected outcome

 

 

2. Introduction –Statement of the problem                                                  _100_
3. Statement of the Problem and Rationale for Study
4. Objectives
5. Definition of Terms (if necessary)

 

 

3. Literature Review—Background to the problem                                    _200_
4. Focused on area of stated problem (no BS)
5. Refers to reasonable number of previous studies
6. Analysis of results and conclusions of previous studies.

 

4. Method—Research design                                                  _250_
5. Subjects (Samples analyzed)
6. Procedures
7. Instruments
8. Presentation and Analysis of Data

 

5. Conclusion—Expected results                                  _100_
6. Interpretation of possible findings
7. Implication
8. Application
9. Re-iterate (without directly repeating) the major take-home messages of the paper

 

 

6. References                    _50_
7. required number of sources
8. in APA format

850 total for paper

 

 

Your overall grade will also include 50 points/paper reviewed                                                                                       __100__

25 points each for posting your drafts on time                                                                  ___50__

 

 

Description of sections

Title page: should be 25 easy points. Title of paper, your name, course, and date are the essentials.

Acknowledgements: another easy 25 points. Thank the folks who helped you out.

The above pages do not count for the page length of the paper.  From here to the end of the conclusion are the pages to count for the 12 – 15 pages the paper is supposed to be. Don’t include figures in the page count either.

Abstract: Now we are getting harder. You should write this last. When you were looking up papers to use as references you probably scanned a lot of abstracts and then didn’t bother to open up the paper to read more. The abstract is all most people will read of your work. Sell your idea here. Your study is important. This is where you convince others to read on. The trick is you have to be brief. Strip your proposal to the bare essentials.

BTW: My husband sat on a national committee selecting papers for a Physics conference recently. The committee only read the abstracts of the submitted papers while making their selection of which papers would be presented. Abstracts make or break careers, they are that important.

Introduction: This is where you tell your audience what you are going to tell them and why it is important. See the list above for content, basically you state your question and tell why the study is important to do.

Literature Review: You read at least one of these, you can think of that as an example. I’m expecting this section to run 5 to 7 pages. Primary literature must be synthesized to describe the current state of knowledge regarding the topic. Data from cited sources should be included and clearly explained. You should use the cited information to develop central themes, and show how the information is interrelated with the proposal.  You want to tell your audience what they need to know to understand the state of the art in your topic. They also need to know who the people are who are working in this area.  When you have a proposal evaluated it often happens that one of the evaluators knows someone who works in your area of interest. They want to see that you did a thorough enough search to include their friend’s work if it is pertinent. You will need to look up many papers to find information and techniques you will need. Do not pad this by including information that isn’t directly pertinent to your investigation. Do not use old or secondary sources. Use lots of in-text citations, every fact you state needs to be cited in the text. Do not use long quotations, paraphrase appropriately.

Methods: aka materials and methods. This is really important, take your time and do a good job. Tell in detail about the experimental design that will answer your question. Use your textbook for information on design; also use the papers you read as examples. This is to be a proposal to do something that you haven’t done yet. The literature review will be in past tense but most of the rest of the paper will be in future tense.

When you discuss methods of doing the study and analyzing the data you will get in the future, convince me you know exactly what to do. You have read methods sections in the paper’s you have analyzed, copy their style and level of detail. (That means yes, you should tell me what pH the experiment runs at or what frequency you will use if they are important. (When I was in graduate school, my professor showed me a paper he was reviewing for publication. The guy did his experiment at the wrong pH and my professor rejected it from publication. Lab folk really do need to be accurate and

specific.)) You can refer to one of your papers, as in “Using the method of Author et. al……” and then include what Mr. Author did in his method.

Do not skip over how you will analyze your data. Think about what numbers you will get and what statistical tests you will use to see if differences are significant. Convince me you know what to do with the raw data.  I think this is really important.

Conclusions: What results might you get and what would that mean? You are expecting to answer your research question. If, say, you are comparing two methods and the results are close to the same what will that mean? What will make one method “better” than the other? What statistical tests do you do to know for sure? Re-iterate (without directly repeating) the major take-home messages of the proposal.

Stop counting pages here. You must have 12 to 15.

References: Use at least 10 sources. They should be review or primary research articles. All should be from peer-reviewed journals. Most should be no more than 5 years old. You might need to cite one article that is in the 6 to 8 year range. Make sure you use APA format correctly.

Rubric: The sections of the research paper will be graded according to these criteria.

Grade	Focus 20%	Support 20%	Use of Language 20%	Thoughtfulness Contents and Relevance 40 %
100% of possible points	All statements are vividly clear and relate to specific topic	Perfect use of APA standards. References meet guidelines.	Writing is well-organized, unified and error free.	Presents more than one well-defined idea about topic. Has developed a hypothesis or identified a problem and outlined an approach to test the hypothesis or resolve the problem.
90 – 99% of possible points	Almost all statements are clear and relevant	A few text notes missing but references meet guidelines.	Writing is organized, unified with a spelling or grammatical error.	Presents one well-defined idea or more than one vaguely defined idea about topic. Has an incomplete hypothesis/problem and only has a vague concept of how to test the hypothesis/solve the problem
80 – 89% of possible points	Some statements are off topic or unclear. Discussion wanders.	Lack of text notes or some references do not meet guidelines	Writing is lacking in organization or contains a few spelling or grammatical errors.	Presents more than one vaguely-defined idea about topic. Has developed an incomplete hypothesis or problem statement but has not outlined an approach to test the hypothesis or resolve the problem.
65 – 79% of possible points	It is difficult to tell what the point of the section is.	Incorrect use or significant lack of text notes or most references do not meet guidelines.	Writing is disorganized. Spelling or grammatical errors impair communication.	Presents one vaguely-defined idea about a potential research topic. Does not present a useful hypothesis/solution to an identified problem.
0% of possible points	Section is missing