All scientific research happens after being proposed and accepted and funded — whether it’s a student’s thesis or dissertation project or experienced researchers seeking grants from a research-funding organization like the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Research proposals contain justification for the project–its context, subject, and methodology. The context and subject are described in the literature review portion of the proposal, and the methodology is described in a separate section.

In this activity,  you will get to practice communicating these aspects of a proposal. Please note that the purpose of what you write here is not for approval since you should have completed your experiment by now, but to help you recognize the connection between proposing a project and communicating the research that comes from completing that project, like the book-ends of the experience.

Part 1
Write up a brief proposal for your observational experiment that includes:

1) An introduction that includes

a sentence explaining the topic and purpose of your research
a synthesis of at least three sources that contextualized and/or provide background about your research (ideally, this is in paragraph form, but a source synthesis chart would also be acceptable
2) A methods section that lists details about the items you studied and the process for data collection

3) An APA-style bibliography of the scholarly peer-reviewed sources you used for #1.