Project 4: Research Proposal Introduction/Rationale This course builds upon assignments in order to make explicit your field’s disciplinary ways of knowing, doing, and writing. In each assignment leading up to this project, you have investigated your disciplinary community (DC) - its ways of knowing, doing, and writing - and you have begun research matching your DC’s ways of knowing and doing. By completing these assignments, you have found that academic genres are socially and rhetorically situated and always responding to communities of practice.

In this project, you will begin to try out your DC’s ways of knowing and doing by writing a research proposal. Using a hybrid of Swales’ “Creating a Research Space” (CARS) format, you will compile and revise work completed throughout the semester in order to write a formal research proposal. Your research proposal should research a problem that is relevant and common to your DC, and it should demonstrate your growing awareness of your DC’s methodology for research.

Using a scaffolding approach with low stakes assignments, students will draft and revise their writing in order to develop and “polish” their research proposals. Students will receive substantive feedback upon each “low stakes” assignment for help in developing their proposals. Finally, students will be required to complete at least two student/instructor conferences.

Assignment Prompt: This project is compiled from six smaller “low stakes” assignments. First, drawing upon previous projects, you will draft an introduction to produce a rationale for your literature review and proposal. Second, once an introduction has been formulated, you will revise your literature review in order to: (a) further analyze whether your research provides adequate background on the research, and (b) show how your research problem fills a gap, and fits into ongoing conversations about the problem or issue. Third, you will draw upon your already gathered research materials in order to propose a “mock” methodology for addressing your research problem. The proposal must be at least “semi–realistic,” must include methodology appropriate to your DC, and must indicate how you would implement your methodology using discipline-specific methods. Finally, you will develop a Discussion section where you discuss the limitations, assumptions, validations, and significance of your research proposal for your DC and the discipline at large. Minimum Requirements

• 10-15 pages

• Features common genre characteristics and structures of academic/professional proposals

• Contains the following major sections: o Introduction: Problem, Rationale, Research Questions, Key Definitions,

and Literature Review o Proposal & Methodology: Must be common in discipline and supported

with references to secondary literature (Generated from Units 1 and 2) o Discussion & Conclusion: Limitations, Assumptions, Validation and

Significance of Research Learning Objectives Read

• Draw upon your research question(s), drafting materials, and literature review to explain how your research fills a gap and fits into the research in your field

Write • Compose a research proposal that uses primary and secondary research methods

to produce an extended research project relevant to the student's discipline or profession.

• Use a flexible writing process and varied technologies to produce texts that address the expectations of the student’s disciplinary or professional discourse community in terms of claims, evidence, organization, format, style, rhetorical situation, strategies, and effects by drawing on an explicit understanding of the genre(s) being composed.

Research • Develop a research problem and rationale for a research proposal appropriate to

your field of study • Research, analyze, and propose a methodology appropriate to your field of study

as well as a discussion of the outcome of that methodology • Suggest a “semi–realistic” method for carrying out the proposed research project

including an explanation of how the method will be implemented: