Sources must be preferably from scholarly journals or high quality trade magazines
Use at least a 12 point Times New Roman or Calibri font with one-margins.
Do not include a cover page or title for your proposal. Just begin with the word “Introduction” centered at the top of the first page.
Your name should appear at the top right of every page in the manuscript (i.e. a header). Page numbers should appear at the bottom right of every page of the manuscript (i.e. a footer).
The Introduction, Literature Review and Methods sections must all be written in narrative (i.e. not outline) form.
The maximum word lengths for each of these section are strict. See The Required Outline for the Final Research Proposal. For the Literature Review section this will require you summarize and combine similar information into one or two sentences that are followed by textual citations from multiple sources. Refer to the APA format guidelines for directions on textual citations. It may be possible to summarize information into tables to save space. You may also decide to delete some information but be careful to not reduce the number of sources used to below twenty sources. Neither the Bibliography nor the Appendix have maximum word requirements.
Only four major section headings (Introduction, Literature Review, Methods and Bibliography) should appear in your manuscript. Each of these should be in bold font and centered above the start of their sections.
If an appendix is used then the word ‘Appendix’ should appear at the left margin in bold type before the content of the appendix. If multiple appendices are necessary, each should be numbered sequentially as they are referred to in the manuscript.
Only two subsection headings (Context and Summary of Prior Research) should appear in your manuscript. Both appear only in the Literature Review section. Each of these subsection headings should be in bold format and at the left margin of your manuscript.
Each of the three main sections (Introduction, Literature Review and Methods) have specific content requirements that must appear in the final manuscript, Subsections headings for these content requirements are not allowed.
The process for writing the first draft of the Literature Review section involves;
Organizing snippets into logical groupings based on the idea or information they contain,
Summarizing the snippets that contain the same information into one or two sentences, and
Writing transition phrases (e.g. “The research finds that …” or “Other researchers have alternatively found that …”) between the snippets so that each paragraph (and in turn the entire manuscript) is flows logically from one thought to the next..
It is anticipated that the Literature Review section will contain a large amount of information from the sources with textual references to the sources from which this information came.
Each paragraph throughout the manuscript must be cohesive. This means that each sentence contained in a paragraph is relevant to the particular topic of that paragraph. Paragraph cohesion relates to the readability of a paragraph. Avoid the temptation of merely stringing together snippets. All paragraphs, regardless of where they appear in the manuscript, must have a minimum of three sentences.
Sources listed in the Bibliography must be;
Actually used within the text of your manuscript, and
In the American Psychological Association format.
Sources include as references within the text of the manuscript must refer to a source that is actually in the Bibliography.
Measurement instruments (e.g. surveys, interview questions, pretests, post-tests, coding sheets, etc.) that are important to your proposed methodology must be:
Fully developed into their required formats,
Referred to within the appropriate part of the manuscript, and
Included in an appendix after the Bibliography section.
Attach your final submission to the assignment page provided in Canvas. All submissions must be either in a .doc or .docx format unless prior arrangements are allowed by the professor.
