BIS 300A
Interdisciplinary Inquiry
Winter 2010
David S.
Goldstein, Ph.D.
Research Proposal Assignment
due in "Group
Pages" of Blackboard at 10:45 a.m. sharp on Wednesday, Feb. 24;
final version due in Learning Portfolio
at 10:45 a.m. sharp on Monday, March 8
The purpose of
this assignment is to develop an appreciation for knowledge production as
practiced in an academic environment, to practice collaborative learning, to
gain confidence in the use of academic resources, and to practice academic
writing.
You will
complete this assignment in stages throughout the course. The final result will
be a research proposal outlining and justifying the knowledge project that you
would pursue were you able to continue your exploration after this course. You
may choose to continue to collaborate with your group as a whole, or you may
work in smaller affiliations if your research interests take you in different
directions. In my experience, the more collaboratively you work, the
better the final product will be. For some excellent suggestions about
working in groups, please visit Prof. Michael Goldberg's web page at <http://faculty.washington.edu/mlg/students/groupskills.html>.
This assignment is meant to help achieve the following course learning goals:
- Understand and appreciate the interdisciplinary production of knowledge and the ways in which it underwrites different aspects of the IAS Program;
- Gain a critical understanding of the IAS Program's diverse and interrelated (inter)disciplinary fields and methods of inquiry;
- Become better critical thinkers and writers, capable of posing, answering, and reposing a variety of complex questions;
- Become better researchers, able to use the resources at UWB and elsewhere in order to identify existing and complementary scholarly work while producing original knowledge through data gathering and interpretation;
- Become better collaborators as learners, researchers, and teachers.
Assignment
Calendar
Wednesday, January 13: Assignment presented in class. Workshop 1 (preliminary mapping of
research topics) in class.
Monday, January 25: Workshop 2 (finding sources) in
class.
Wedneday, January 27: Free time in computer classroom.
Monday, February 8: Free time in computer classroom and cluster consultations with instructor.
Wedneday, February 10: Free time.
Wednesday, Feb. 24, 10:45 a.m. sharp: Research proposal and
contribution paragraph due to cluster members in Blackboard's Group Pages.
Monday, March 1, 10:45 a.m. sharp: Confidential online peer evaluation survey due.
Monday, March 8, 10:45 a.m. sharp: Final version of paper due
in learning portfolio, AND cluster contribution
online survey due (URL will be provided).
The Goldstein Foundation
Riches for Research.™
c/o
Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences
Box 358530
18115 Campus
Way NE
Bothell, WA 98011-8246
January 13, 2010
Dear Sir or
Madam:
We understand
that you are on your way to earning a bachelor's degree at the University of
Washington, Bothell. We know that the graduates of that institution are
consistently bright, well-rounded, thoughtful, perceptive, and creative (perhaps
partly as a result of the outstanding professors there). We therefore believe
that you have all the makings of an excellent researcher. We are prepared to
offer you $500,000 to conduct research on an education-related topic of
your choice if we select a proposal that you submit. Please carefully review the
documentation below. We look forward to reading your proposal.
Sincerely,
David S.
Goldstein, Ph.D.
Founder and
President
In your
proposal, which should run from 1250 to 1500 words (according to the word count
tool in Microsoft Word, and not counting the Works Cited page), you should be
attentive to the territory we have explored in this course. Your proposal should
cover the following four elements, and each section corresponding to these parts
should be clearly labeled as such:
-
Describe and
justify the problem or problems you will be posing; that is, the question or
questions you will be asking within the IAS concentration to which your cluster has been assigned;
-
Describe and
justify the specific secondary sources you will be reading in order to orient
your inquiry; that is, the conversation you will be entering into based on
your preliminary
research into
the topic;
-
Describe and
justify the methods of inquiry you will be using (and not using, if
appropriate to discuss);
-
Provide a tentative hypothesis concerning what you think you will find
at the "end" of your research (or explain why a hypothesis is not feasible
yet).
- Identify the audience that will be interested in the
knowledge that you produce. Give a sense of how and where you would like to
"publish" your research (e.g., a scholarly article in a specific journal, a
documentary film screened at a specific location, or a performance piece
enacted at a strategic site).
Throughout this
exercise, remember that you are trying to convince the Goldstein Foundation to
fund your research, so make your proposal as solid and persuasive as possible.
You must convince the Foundation (a) that this research is worth doing,
(b) that it has not been done before, (c) that it contributes
new knowledge about the topic while building upon what
has been done before, and (d) that you are the team that should do this research
because you are most familiar with the existing research and you understand what
piece of the topic still needs to be added.
Your proposal
must fall within the range of topics appropriate for your cluster's assigned
Interdisciplinary Studies concentration:
To persuade the Goldstein
Foundation that you have done your homework and are already familiar with the
scholarly work already done on your topic, you must cite at least five sources,
and at least two of those must be scholarly, from peer-reviewed
journals. Our research librarian, Dani Rowland, has created a research
guide to help you: http://libguides.uwb.edu/BIS300Goldstein. Be
sure to use
Ulrich's Periodicals Directory to determine whether a journal is peer-reviewed
or
not. (Remember to search for the name of the journal, not the title of the article. Look for the little referee shirt icon; that indicates a peer-reviewed, or refereed, journal.)
Once you
have responded to these prompts as fully and carefully as possible, please
format your paper in MLA style and in accordance with "Tips for Better Prose" at
http://faculty.washington.edu/davidgs/Prose.html.
Please include a Works Cited page formatted in MLA style. The Works Cited
page is
notpart of
the word count.
As always, I
would encourage you to brainstorm with others in your group about this proposal,
but the proposals themselves can be either individual or collaborative. Your research proposal is
due in your group's Group Pages area of
Blackboard
no
later than 10:45 a.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 24. You do not need to
submit your proposal to me in any other way. I will download your proposal
from the Group Pages area of Blackboard. I will deduct ten percentage
points from the final version of research proposals that did not have a
completed version (not a
rough draft!) posted by this deadline. Each member of
your group must post a copy of a proposal, even if it is identical to proposals
submitted by other members of your research cluster!
I
have
placed
a sample proposal in Course Documents area of Blackboard , but keep in mind that the assignment has changed somewhat
since that paper was written, so your paper will not be quite the same.
You should not
include
a budget section.
As a group, you
and your colleagues will decide how much feedback to provide one another on your
research proposals. I ask only that every group member agree to the group's
decision and follow through with it. Your goal is the same as mine: we both want
your paper to be as good as possible by the time the final version gets into
your portfolio for me to grade.
Revision/Final Version
: If
you like, you may revise your research proposal based on your cluster members'
comments and on mine, which I will provide for all research proposals submitted
in Blackboard's Group Pages by the deadline. (I strongly recommend getting comments from a Writing Center
consultant [
http://www.uwb.edu/writingcenter/
], as well.) Using feedback from your peers and me, you may revise your paper, still adhering to the
length requirements outlined above for your original paper. Remember to do a
word count to check the length. Remember that it must be a Word document, and
must be
savedas a
Word document using the "Save As" command in Word's File menu. As a file
name, use your last name (with first letter capitalized) and first initial
(capitalized), like this: GoldsteinD. I will e-mail my comments to you
in a few days. (I will not respond to papers submitted after
the deadline because I will have run out of time that I
allotted for this work.) I will not grade this version, but, in addition
to providing comments, I will indicate whether I feel it is an early, middle, or
late draft, and will provide recommendations for revision. (See
<http://faculty.washington.edu/davidgs/WritingAssess.html>.) Please note that I expect this
version to be as good as you possibly can make it. If it appears that you did not
make a serious effort to make this version a final draft, I will not provide
comments on it.
Then, when you submit your Learning
Portfolio, include this revised research proposal. I will
grade this final version using the criteria below.
Criteria for grading the
final version of your research proposal . Please carefully read "Criteria for Assessing Writing"
at http://faculty.washington.edu/davidgs/WritingAssess.html
for an explanation of these
items:
|
Content |
50
percent
|
Organization
|
10
percent
|
|
Reasoning |
20
percent |
|
Rhetoric
|
10
percent |
Conventions |
10 percent
|
TOTAL
|
30 percent of final course grade
|
Contribution paragraph: No
later than 10:45 a.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 24, submit one paragraph describing
what you personally contributed to your cluster's research proposal. Be
specific (e.g., "I found two of the articles used in the proposal and wrote the
Methods section of the proposal. I also facilitated one of the cluster
meetings to keep us organized").
Cluster contributions
survey: After 10:45 a.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 24, but no later
than 10:45 a.m. on Monday, March 1, complete a brief, online survey
regarding your impressions of your cluster members' contributions to your
proposal after reading each cluster member's contribution paragraph in your
Group Pages area of Blackboard
. I will use this input as a "checks and balances" in
conjunction with the self-reported descriptions and my own observations.
If you do not know what a particular cluster member did, please just say
so.
Your comments will remain
confidential.
Some additional
advice:
-
Get in the
habit of saving your work often (maybe every ten minutes) so you do not lose
everything when your computer freezes. It also is a good idea to keep multiple
copies in different places, such as on a different computer, on diskettes or
Zip disks, or in your electronic "shell" on the Dante computer server. I
usually e-mail important files to myself at the end of the work day, so if my
computer blows up,
I still can retrieve my work.
-
Visit the
Writing Center (see<
http://www.bothell.washington.edu/writingcenter/>). They are professionals trained to
help you become a better writer, so visit them! Remember that their goal is to
help you become a better writer, not to make this particular paper better, so
you are responsible for applying what they teach you to this paper and others
that you will write.
- I do not have
time to read rough drafts, but I am very glad to discuss your paper as you
work on it. You would be wise to visit me during office hours (see syllabus)
to make sure you are on the right track, to see whether your approach makes
sense to me, and to get advice about any particular difficulties you
might be encountering.
- Re-read this
assignment sheet just before submitting the final copy of your paper to make
sure it meets all of the requirements.
- Remember to
keep your graded essay for your learning portfolio due at the end of this
course and for the graduation portfolio that you will complete in your senior
seminar (see <http://www.uwb.edu/IAS/ba/seniorseminar/portfolio.xhtml>).
This page last updated January 12, 2010.
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