INT6067 Chap.9 Writing the Research Proposal
Writing the Research Proposal
Eight sections, three marked items
The individual report is a research proposal for a project in artificial intelligence and educational technology, written alone, of at least 1,800 words in English.
The instruction lists eight elements it must contain: a title, an introduction, a literature review, a research purpose or hypotheses, a methodology, a statement of significance and expected contributions, a timeline and references. The marking sheet groups them into three items worth ten, forty and ten.
Five of the eight sections share the largest item and none of them is the introduction, so reading the two documents against each other is the fastest thirty minutes available on this assessment.
Argued, not merely present
The forty mark item does not ask for the components to be present; it asks for them to be described and discussed with argumentation, clarification and evidence where necessary.
A methodology that says a questionnaire will be used has satisfied presence and nothing else. One that says which questionnaire, why that one rather than a shorter alternative, and what is lost by the choice, has done what the marks are for. The same test applies to every component: name the alternative you rejected and the reason.
The item also names expected outcomes, products and outputs alongside the literature, purposes and methods, so the outputs paragraph is graded rather than a courtesy.
Write it in the order that keeps the argument continuous
The sections are read in the published order and are not best written in it. Start with the purpose, because nothing else can be fixed until it is.
Then the methodology, because writing it reveals whether the purpose was specific enough. Then the literature review, now that you know which studies you have to argue with rather than merely cite. The introduction comes fourth and is far easier once you know what the study turned out to be. Significance, timeline and title take an hour at the end.
Students who write forwards spend their final week rewriting an introduction that promised a study they did not design.
The timeline is a test of whether you understand your own design
Markers look for two things in a schedule: that the slow, externally controlled activities start early, and that the bands overlap in a way one person could actually work.
A schedule in which consent, building, collection, analysis and writing follow one another in neat sequence describes a project nobody has ever run.
The account of a proposal given in the first lecture also includes protection of human subjects alongside the introductory, literature, design, method, analysis and timeline sections; the required list does not name it separately, so if your project involves minors, classroom recording or personal records, put a short paragraph on consent, storage and anonymisation inside the methodology anyway.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Eight required sections and the three marked items they group into
- 02
Where the sixty marks actually sit
- 03
Argumentation, clarification and evidence as the standard for the largest item
- 04
Spending 1,800 words across sections of unequal weight
- 05
Writing order against reading order
- 06
Purpose statements specific enough to force a methodology
- 07
Significance against expected contributions
- 08
Timelines that admit their dependencies
- 09
Consent and anonymisation inside the methodology
A purpose statement rewritten until the method follows from it
- 2Say why the original cannot be built on.
- 4Rewrite it naming population, intervention and outcome.
- 4List what the methodology is now obliged to contain.
Key terms
- Purpose Statement
- The sentence stating what a study sets out to achieve or to test, specific enough that the methodology follows from it. Verbs such as explore leave it unbuildable.
- Hypothesis
- A statement naming a comparison and a direction that the study could show to be false. One that cannot come out false is a purpose statement with the wrong label.
- Expected Contributions
- What the study will add that does not yet exist: a finding, an instrument or a designed artefact. It belongs to the literature, and it is not the same as significance.
- Significance
- Why the problem is worth studying, stated in terms of the world rather than the literature: a teacher, a school, a policy. Merging it with contributions produces a paragraph that says the topic matters twice.
- Project Timeline
- The schedule of milestones and activities. It is read as a test of whether the design is understood, so the activities somebody else controls belong at the start.
- Protection of Human Subjects
- The consent, storage and anonymisation arrangements for people who take part. The first lecture names it among proposal sections even though the required list folds it into the methodology.
- Data Analysis Procedure
- The statement of which comparison or coding will be performed, on which measure, and what result would count as answering the question. It is the element most often missing from a draft methodology.
Writing the Research Proposal FAQ
What has to be in the methodology section?
The instruction names four things: the research design, the data sources, the data collection methods and the data analysis procedures. The fourth is the one most often missing from a draft, because students describe who will be studied and with what instrument and then stop, leaving a marker to guess what happens to the data.
Two or three sentences fix it, and writing them also reveals whether the design collects enough to support the claim you intend to make.
Is 1,800 words a target or a minimum?
A minimum, stated as such, and the sections are not equal in weight so the words should not be spread evenly. More than half of them belong to the three sections inside the largest marked item that a reader cannot evaluate without detail, which in practice means the literature review, the methodology and the outputs. The title, purpose and timeline are short by nature and lose nothing by being compact.
What else can cost marks before anyone reads my argument?
A set of requirements with nothing to do with quality: the group name, student number and name on the cover page, a title, headings and subheadings, the required citation style throughout, the file naming convention, the statement on any generative tools used, a similarity index at or below fifteen per cent, and the deadline itself, since late submission is not allowed.
None is difficult and all are checked, which is why they belong on a list rather than in your memory on the last evening.
How detailed should the timeline be?
Detailed enough to show the dependencies and no more. Markers look for the slow externally controlled activities starting first, notably consent and access, and for bands that overlap the way one person actually works rather than following one another in neat sequence. Naming the milestone that would move everything if it slipped, and what you would do instead, is worth more than another row in the table.
Assessment move
Write the purpose first and the introduction fourth, then read the whole draft once looking only for the thread: problem, gap, purpose, method, significance should name the same things in the same words. Where the thread breaks is almost always between the literature review and the methodology, because those two sections get written a fortnight apart, so read them back to back in one sitting before you touch anything else.
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