Editing Introduction to Graduate Research (Fall 2023)/Final project (section)

==== Part II: Research Plan (about 3,500 words) ====

Please use about 3,500 words to elaborate a detailed plan for a research project you plan to conduct. This must be a project for which you are responsible for the research design and are thus actually in a position to create the research plan (I am not interested in reading your advisor's research plans or projects here, although I understand that your project may need to advance their grants or goals and that you may have every intention of collaborating on the study and potentially even refining the research design with them). This may be a larger-scale project (i.e., something that leads to a dissertation or book manuscript) or a more narrowly-scoped project (i.e., something that yields a single study within a multi-study research paper). Whatever the case, the research plan should advance your interests and, ideally, your progress towards your degree/career goals.

At a minimum, the Research Plan should elaborate the following:
* '''A rationale for the study.''' What broad challenges or problems in the world motivate this project? What puzzle does the study promise to address?
* '''Specific objectives.''' What specific objectives will the study achieve? Note that these might be framed in terms of contributions to research fields, domains of application, and impacts on society (or even a combination of all three).
* '''Critical background and context.''' What contextual knowledge is essential to understand this work? Please note that this should not be an involved or over-long literature review, but only the most crucial elements needed to motivate and understand the approach you are pursuing and how it derives from key prior work. You should feel free to introduce a small set of key references or arguments that help motivate and situate your work.
* '''Details and rationale of the research approach.''' How will you pursue the project? What setting, data, methods, system design, evaluation, or other materials will you use to execute the work? Why is this approach uniquely/ideally suited to achieving the study objectives and addressing the rationale for the study?
* '''Anticipated findings and contribution.''' Sure, you have not conducted the work yet, but what do you think you'll find/do and what implications do you anticipate it will have for the fields of research and practice that motivate the project?
* '''References.'''

''Note: if you feel that the Research Plan part of the assignment described above is a poor fit for your specific research aims or situation , I am happy to discuss your situation or ideas for alternative assignment parameters. Please contact me if you have concerns in this regard.''