Proposals are composed in many situations, from the development of projects (in academic and professional contexts) to requests for funding. Essentially the writer of a proposal is suggesting or describing a future action, sometimes one that needs the support of the audience. The audience of this document you are writing for this class will either be informed of this action or make a decision about whether the suggested plan should happen or happen in the proposed way. In this assignment, you will propose what you will do to collect data through primary research for the IMRAD Essay so that the instructor can provide guidance on this process. Note that you are not just writing this assignment to demonstrate how correct your grammar skills are; you ARE writing this assignment to communicate with your instructor about how you will collect data.
Instructions-Primary Research
For the IMRAD Essay, you will do textual and primary research to help you develop an informed argument. The textual research will be covered in the Literature Review.
Thinking about what you learned about your topic from doing textual research, refine your research question that you developed for Response #4: Research Topic and Assignment #1: Literature Review. Examine your research question and determine what information you need to answer it. For example, if you are asking "How are writing instructors trained to address language diversity?" you could answer that question by interviewing ODU's Writing Program Administrator about what she does to train the faculty or by surveying the faculty. Notice how you would get two different perspectives on the same experience. From the administrator you could learn the intention of the training's design, and from the faculty you could learn how effective they think the training is in term of learning about language diversity. One could collect both data and triangulate the results–or see where perspectives agree and where they disagree. But considering the short amount of time you have to do this work, you will only be required to collect one set of data. Once you determine a method for collecting data, you will want to determine how you will design the data collection.
For this 750-1000- word document you will want to...
- identify the topic you will be studying and explain why it is an important topic to study–both for you and to benefit others. You do not have to make it seem like you are going to resolve or address an issue on a national or global level; it is often best to think about how you might be able to change hearts and minds locally.
- pose research questions that you will answer over the course of the project
- identify how you will conduct primary research, provide instructions on how you will go about conducting this research (write these instructions in a way that another person can pick them up and do the research for you) and explain why all of your decisions will help you answer your research questions. This means that you should know exactly what you are going to do, who you are collecting data from (e.g., interviewees and people to take your survey), as well as when and where the data will be collected. If you are doing an interview, you should have a commitment by the time you submit this assignment. All six of these bolded terms need to be addressed in your project.
- remember to address the why. For the why, you are being asked to justify the decisions that you are making for collecting data the way that you are. You can draw upon the reading from the Purdue OWL about conducting research to help you do this. A more sophisticated proposal will cite from the Purdue OWL about research methods (e.g., the Purdue OWL) to explain the benefits of the methods you have chosen and why, as a result, that method is beneficial for answering your research question.
- include the survey or interview questions to explain how you will collect your data. Or if you are going to do an observation, describe what you will focus upon.
Logistic:
- 750-1000 words
- single-spaced
- Complete rough draft is due by March 5, 2019 and shared with your assigned collaborator. (see shared Activity Folder). Also submit your draft to the instructor through Google Classroom. Please note that the instructor is just checking for completion and will not be reviewing it. The instructor has already reviewed most of the content for this work in previous Responses. Non-submission of a draft will result in a 10% deduction of your Assignment grade.
- On March 19, 2019 submit the final draft to the instructor on the "Student Work" page for "Assignment #2: Research Proposal" in the Google Classroom.
- 100 points
In addition to the general evaluation criteria, the instructor will be looking for evidence of...
- an understanding of the problem or issue you have chosen
- an understanding of your audience, the instructor. Do you write this using academic conventions? Do you write this so that the instructor can provide useful guidance on the upcoming assignment?
- a research question that you can reasonably answer
- a relatively clear and focused research agenda? do you demonstrate some understanding of the topic and does your research process help you to address the gaps in your knowledge?
- an academic or professional persona; this means you should adopt a professional tone and publish a well-edited paper
- an understanding of the composing decisions that you made. Can you explain the decisions that you made for the actions you have proposed to accomplish?
- a detailed description of your future actions. Your audience should have a good sense of what you plan to do
- appropriate use of conventions, including MLA, APA, or an appropriate citation formatting