The first stage of the Investigative Research Project will require you to identify your topic, your work completed so far, and provide an annotated bibliography describing your sources, their credibility and their relevance to your work.
The first document in this project, the Project Statement, is simply a 300 to 500 word document written to me (it can be single-spaced) that lets me know:
What topic you are pursuing for your Investigative Research Project and a working thesis for your paper.
Where you are at in your work on the topic, what you still need to do and how you could complete it.
This is a formal document and should, therefore, contain an introduction and conclusion as well as the material listed above.
The second document, the Annotated Bibliography, is a document designed to describe the overall state of your research toward this project. In general, the document is a Works Cited list for your essay (or Reference page, depending on whether your discipline uses APA or MLA) with each citation on the list followed by a two-paragraph annotation containing:
The first paragraph should provide a brief summary of the source, touching on its key points and conclusions.
The second paragraph should assess the quality of the source (where does it come from and why is it credible) and describe exactly how it applies to your work and how it will be used in your final Investigative Research project.
The annotated bibliography must be at least ten sources in length and presented in appropriate APA/MLA format.
As the last step of the investigative research project, you will submit the research project itself. This is project resultant from the work for the Project Statement/Annotated Bibliography and is the culmination of the study and scholarship you’ve done on your topic over the course of the semester.
Your final project should run approximately eight to ten pages (2000 – 2500 words) or the equivalent depending on the project genre and medium and needs to use at least ten outside sources cited correctly in APA or MLA. The project statement and annotated bibliography are a separate assignment in terms of submission, so you do not need to submit them with the final paper (nor will they count toward the word count). You must also submit an unannotated Works Cited or Reference page with this project. This project will be worth 300 point
