Reference no: EM132184103

Question: These are the components which your proposals need to include:

• an introductory paragraph with the background information about your project;

• the literature review (four sources which you worked on before; you are welcome to use some additional related outside sources there too);

• information about the research gap observed in previous research in connection with your topic (= the so called "problem statement");

• your actual research question(s) and purposes or objectives;

• the methodology or research design of your proposed project, including the participants, materials, variables, tools and instruments, methods of research, and/or the other aspects enlisted at the beginning of the "Elements of the Methods Section" exercise which we discussed in our Wednesday's lesson; you need to include in the proposal only those parameters which you think are relevant to your particular research;

• the final paragraph containing some information about your hypotheses and/or expectations about possible results of the proposed research and especially about the reasons why you think that the proposed project is important (and for whom, of course).

So as you can see from this list of the main elements of your proposals, the first four of them can be taken from your Introduction assignment; only the last two components of the proposal need to be written especially for the proposal now. At the same time, when using your Introduction in the proposal now, you can (and are encouraged) to make some small changes when you think it would be useful (for example, to change the order of information, or certain statements, references to previous related research, etc.).

2. Before starting to work on your actual proposals, you are encouraged to take a look at the related materials in the Content section of our D2L:

• the video "How to Develop a Good Research Topic" (in the "Videos" folder);

• the slides "Writing a Research Proposal" (in the "Slides" folder);

• "Excerpts from a Quantitative and Qualitative Methods Section" (in the "Readings" and "Handouts" folders); and

• "A Sample Research Proposal with Comments" (in the "Handouts" section).

3. Proposals need to be formatted according to APA rules, - the same way as you already did in your previous assignments for our class (including the title page and running head, list of references on a separate page at the end of the section, Times New Roman 12, double-spaced, 0.5''-indented at the beginning of each new paragraph, etc. ).

4. As well as in the Introduction section, most of the verbs used in the paragraph about the background information and in the literature review will be in the present tense ("the scholars believe that...," "this topic has become popular due to the efforts of certain researchers," etc.). Only when you refer to a particular experiment, other researchers' previous observations, etc.), you'll probably use the verbs in their past form too ("In Johnson's experiment, it was observed that...," "The researchers gave the subjects several new videos to watch," etc.).

At the same time, your Methods part of the proposal will have mostly the future forms of verbs ("In the proposed project, I am going to invite 20 OSU freshmen and sophomores to participate in this study"; "The descriptive qualitative text analysis will prevail throughout the whole study," etc.).

5. Please make sure then that your proposals are typically 3-5 pages long (or at least not much longer and especially not much shorter than that) plus a separate page for the list of references. Out of those 3-5 pages of the proposal itself, approximately two pages should be used for its Methodology section.

6. Don't forget to go through the evaluation criteria in the "Methods Assignment Sheet " and "Research Proposal Rubric" before starting to work on your proposals. You received these rubrics today in class; they can also be found in the "Evaluation Rubrics and Feedback Keys/Codes."

7. Pay attention that you will receive two grades for this assignment: one - for the proposal itself, and the other - only for its Methods section. Nevertheless, you need to submit to the related dropbox folder on our D2L only your proposal. So it means that you don't need to submit the Methods section separately, but only within the proposal itself.

8. If you decide to use some additional outside sources in your proposal, please don't forget to cite them in the text itself and in the list of references after the text.

9. When you have completed and reread/revised your research proposal, please upload it into the "Research Proposal + Methods Section" dropbox on our D2L.