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490 Project Report

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Every project has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  Within this, your research will entail a variety of specific tasks leading you to the completion of the project as a whole.  This, and the Design and Structure pages (use the buttons at the bottom of this page to get to them), is a rough--and adaptable--outline of those tasks.

Your grade in this course does NOT depend on whether you irrefutably "solve" the problem or definitively "answer" your research question.  Rather, I shall be scoring you on the basis of how well you express yourself for each required component.  A scoring checklist for your project report appears at the bottom of this page; use it as a guide to assembling your final product.  READ IT, and include ALL requirements!

Written Project Report

You must submit your final project report as a Word document in your team's network drop box.  Do NOT send it as an e-mail attachment, and do not split the report into multiple files.  

The final report must have each of the following sections.

• Title:   Every project must have a title.  A good title indicates briefly "What, Where, and When"; it may also indicate other attributes of the project, so long as these do not make the title excessively lengthy (a three-line title is too long).  You must also state the names (and perhaps affiliations) of all report AUTHORS below the title.

• Abstract:  A brief (200 words or less) overview of your problem, methods, findings, and conclusions.  Be direct and to the point; the number of people who read your abstract typically is an order of magnitude greater than the number who read your entire report.  Abstracts are the academic equivalent of executive summaries in the business world.  You should write the abstract AFTER you finish your report, so as to include only the salient details of your work ("descriptive abstract").  The abstract appears at the beginning of your report, however.

• Statement of the Problem:  Usually this occurs in the Introduction.  At most, you should devote no more than a single paragraph presenting your research question.   Sometimes you can do this in a paragraph having only one sentence.  Another option is to pose the problem as contrasting  hypothesis and null hypothesis statements.  However you go about it, you should ensure that the research question is concise and stands out clearly from other prose.

• Literature Review:  This often appears as a subsection of the Introduction.  You should review only works relevant to your project, not exhaustively list every article even remotely related to your topic.  Offer brief comments about each piece's   significance to your research.

I recommend that you use the very concise and convenient "Author, date" citation style.  You have no upper limit to the number of citations in your report, but you must have at least five, of which at least one should be a book and another a periodical article.

• Methodological Design & Objectives:  You must indicate what methods you used to address your research question, and what purpose you had for using them.  You must also reveal what alternative methods you considered, and the reasons you opted not to use them.  [BACK]

• Data Acquisition & Assessment:  This may be either a subsection of you methodological design section, or fall under a full separate heading of its own.  Either way, you must indicate how you obtained your data, attribute the source if you use secondary data, and state your judgment and reasoning about the quality of your data.

• Data Analysis and Results:  This should be a separate section with two subheadings.  The Data Analysis subsection should detail what rationale you used for judging the raw results of your analytical techniques.  The Results subsection then provides your raw findings, and the outcome of any testing that you conducted.  Wherever possible you should use tables to help keep your report as concise as possible.

• Interpretation, Evaluation, & Significance:  This separate full section consists of three subsections.  Under the Interpretation subsection you will have a discussion first of your interpretation criteria, and then a presentation of your interpretations.

  The Evaluation subsection is where you assess the quality and reliability of your data, findings, and interpretations.  This is an extremely important subsection!   You are to describe both the strengths and weaknesses of your research.  Be advised that discovering unavoidable weaknesses is not a deficiency that will diminish your grade, but failure to disclose any that you recognize is unethical concealment.   The purpose of noting where weaknesses occurred is to enable yourself and other researchers to devise improvements during further investigations.  This is extremely valuable insight that you provide as the experienced researcher!

  The Significance subsection all too often gets omitted, but you must include it in your final report.  This is where you get to "wave your own flag" a bit.  It is here that you indicate what you have done differently from previous researchers, and point out what is original within your work.  It is also here where you give reasons for why you believe your project has been worth conducting, and how you believe its results are of benefit to the professional community.

• Placement within the Topic:  This usually brief section is where you tie your team's work to the body of literature that you described earlier in the Literature Review.  Make special note of any of your findings that differ from what is usual in others' work, but also note where your work supports the findings of others.   You should also note where your specific work falls within the more general theories that pertain to your topic.

• Summary & Conclusion:  This section is your final "wrap-up", where as briefly as possible (this section should not exceed three paragraphs) you reiterate the main generalizations that have emerged from your project.   You do not include any further literature review or discussions of methodology here; concentrate on YOUR findings and interpretations.

• References:  This is a listing of all work by others that you have cited anywhere within your report, including any figures or data sets.  It is NOT to be an exhaustive listing of all literature that exists about your topic (that is a bibliography, not a reference list).  Include ONLY works that you have cited.

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N. C. Heywood maintains this page, last updated 14JAN10.