6038BMS - Research project proposal and submission of ethics application: Research Design for Biomedical Science Assignment

Assessment brief

You are required to research and plan your final year project and present it in a scientific format. Your proposal consists of two sections: the literature review and the experimental design. Within each section, you will need to complete the following sub-sections. To assist with your submission, a template will be provided for you to use. 

Literature Review

• Summary (approx. 200 words)
  This should be a brief lay summary of the background for the proposed project.
• Rationale/justification for the project (approx. 600 - 800 words)
  Your project should be informed by published work therefore in this section you should be using scientific papers to document both the reasoning for the project but also for the methods being used. Within this section you should also consider the wider societal and economic implications of your project.
• Aims (approx. 50 – 100 words)
  The aim should state what you ultimately want to find out at the end of your project, objectives are the experiments/steps that you will need to carry out to fulfil the aim.
• Hypothesis/Research Question (approx. 200 words)
  Information from your literature review will provide evidence, which supports the predicted outcome of your aim. For some projects, it may not be appropriate to state a hypothesis, but your research question should be clearly defined.

Experimental design (approx. 800 words)

This should provide a clear plan of how you will collect the data for your project. There should be sufficient detail as to how experiments will be carried out so that when you begin to conduct your experiments, you can go into the lab and do this independently based on the information you have provided in the proposal. Consideration of ethical and health and safety issues should be clearly stated as part of the experimental design. 

• How data will be analysed and any statistical tests which will be used should also be included within this section.
• You also need to include a time plan (Gantt Chart) which provides an overview of how you will structure your data collection.

You are required to research and plan your final year project and present it in a scientific format. This assessment ensures that you research and demonstrate understanding for the rationale of the project including what is required to carry out the project. It also provides you with plan for your experiments for the data collection period.

Module Learning Outcomes:

The Learning Outcomes for this module align to the marking criteria which can be found at the end of this brief. Ensure you understand the marking criteria to ensure successful achievement of the assessment task. The following module learning outcomes are assessed in this task:
1. Define a research question based on a critical review of current scientific literature
2. Design relevant methods, with consideration of ethics and health and safety, to address the hypothesis
3. Identify appropriate data analysis approaches, including the selection of suitable statistical tests.
4. Identify potential economic, societal and commercial applications of research projects, including awareness of intellectual property rights.