BIS 300F Research Proposal

BIS 300F

Interdisciplinary Inquiry:

The Aims of Education

Autumn 2006

David S. Goldstein, Ph.D.

Research Proposal Assignment

due in "Group Pages" of Blackboard at 5:35 p.m. sharp on Thursday, Nov. 16;
final version due in Learning Portfolio at 5:35 p.m. sharp on Tuesday, Dec. 5

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.uwb.edu/mgoldberg/students/groupskills.html>.

Assignment Calendar

Tuesday, Oct. 10: Assignment presented in class. Research clusters formed in class.

Tuesday, Oct. 17: Preliminary mapping of research topics in class.

Tuesday, Oct. 24: Guided research in class.

Tuesday, Oct. 31: Guided research in class.

Thursday, Nov. 9: Free time in computer classroom.

Tuesday, Nov. 14: Free time in computer classroom.

Thursday, Nov. 16, 5:35 p.m. sharp: Research proposal due to groupmates in Blackboard's Group Pages.

Tuesday, Nov. 28: Prepare for research cluster presentations (without instructor)

Thursday, Nov. 30, and Tuesday, Dec. 5: Research cluster presentations in class

Tuesday, Dec. 5, 5:35 p.m. sharp: Final version of paper due in learning portfolio, AND "roles" report due in Blackboard's Group Pages (but I strongly recommend submitting this earlier, by a deadline your cluster members agree upon), AND e-mail message to David evaluating other cluster members' contributions.

The Goldstein Foundation

Riches for Research.™

c/o Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences
Box 358530
18115 Campus Way NE
Bothell, WA 98011-8246

October 10, 2006

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;
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);
End your proposal with 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), as well as a sense of 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.

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. Check <http://www.bothell.washington.edu/library/guides/sources.html> for a guide to distinguishing scholarly articles.

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 not part 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. Give me a rich and detailed sense, in other words, of where each of you would travel next, either by yourselves or with others in your group. Any of this material could be included in your research presentation at the end of the course. Your research proposal is due in your group's Group Pages area of Blackboard no later than 5:35 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 16. 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 will place 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).

Because I want your classmates to benefit from your learning, you will present, along with your research cluster, a summary of your work in class on Nov. 30 or Dec. 5 (to be determined). Each research cluster will have approximately five minutes of class time per member in order to present and discuss the knowledge travels that have led you from the course materials, through various (inter)disciplinary archives (sites of study) and methods of inquiry, to new knowledge and questions. You can think of your presentation as a travelogue, a slide show, or picture album. But remember how difficult it is to make one's own travels interesting to others. You will need to edit the documentation of your experiences, and use your time well. As you edit, focus on two points of interest: how and why the original question/problem posed by your group may have changed during the course of your travels, and how your work has expanded what you think about when you think about the aims of education. As always in good presentations, try to balance the information and ideas you will present to the class with opportunites for open discussion. I strongly recommend reading Prof. Michael Goldberg's "Tips for Oral Presentations" at <http://faculty.washington.edu/davidgs/Oral.html> as you work on your group's presentation.

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 of 5:35 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 16. (I strongly recommend getting comments from a Writing Center consultant [<http://www.bothell.washington.edu/writingcenter/>], as well.) Using what you learned in the Revision Workshop that we will conduct or have conducted for your essay assignment (see the syllabus for the date of this event), and from your peers' critiques of your paper (if your group decided to provide such critiques for each other) and on my comments (which will be general but not specific, so I encourage you to provide comments for one another), 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 saved as 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 about one week. (I will not respond to papers submitted after the Nov. 16 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, choose this revised research proposal as your included sample. 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

Roles Report: No later than 5:35 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 5, you will submit, in the "Group Pages" of Blackboard, a single Word document that describes, briefly, what each cluster member did for the group research that led to your individual or collective proposals. I strongly recommend that you collectively agree to an earlier deadline for this document because each of you will need to read it before submitting your individual comments: By the Dec. 5 deadline, I want each cluster member to e-mail me, separately, to give me a very brief, narrative evaluation of what each cluster member contributed, which I will use 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, although if the majority of members of your cluster share an opinion about a cluster member that differs from that cluster member's self-perception, I will point out the discrepancy to that individual so he or she will have a chance to respond. Be sure to read your cluster's "Roles" document, which should be posted by your cluster before the deadline stated at the top of this assignment sheet, before you write your evaluations. Some of your cluster members might have done work that you did not know about.

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 paper for the graduation portfolio that you will complete in your senior capstone course. (See <http://www.bothell.washington.edu/IAS/degrees/BLS/requirements.html#graduate>.)

This page last updated October 11, 2006.

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Content	50 percent
Organization	10 percent
Reasoning	20 percent
Rhetoric	10 percent
Conventions	10 percent
TOTAL	30 percent of final course grade

BIS 300F

Interdisciplinary Inquiry: The Aims of Education

The Aims of Education

Autumn 2006

David S. Goldstein, Ph.D.

Research Proposal Assignment

The Goldstein Foundation

Interdisciplinary Inquiry:

The Aims of Education