7165EXQ Research Project CW1 Assignment Brief 2025

7165EXQ Assignment Task

Proposal (10 credits)

This is a pass/fail assessment - see the marking rubric below. 

If you do not pass at the first attempt you will need to improve and resubmit your proposal to Turnitin before your final submission (to be advised). You will not be penalised for this 2nd attempt. 

Failure to improve the original attempt to a passable standard or failure to resubmit will lead to a failure of the whole module, regardless of your dissertation mark. In this event you will need to resit at the next opportunity in the following semester.

7165EXQ Assessment details: 

You are required to submit a 1,500 word proposal on the date specified above. You should have been working on this proposal during your 2nd semester with support for your dissertation supervisor and/or tutor. Your proposal should be viable and you should provide enough detail for your supervisor to determine its feasibility.

The proposal should cover the following areas (the Rubric can be found below). 

You are NOT required to provide an abstract or executive summary. 

You must achieve a pass in all the following tasks to pass this component.

Title: 

Provide a succinct title (not more than 20 words in length). Try to give the reader a clear picture of the project topic, what the research will do (e.g., evaluate or test something) and where (i.e., give it a geographic context if appropriate).

Context & Rational for the Project: 

Provide the background context and rational for your research topic. Outline the main published research that has been undertaken to date in your area of interest and highlight the perceived research 'gap' or problem/issue that your research intends to address. Make sure you provide a good range of current academic and/or technical references to support your research context. This section should demonstrate your initial academic reading from a range of academic sources and identify that there is a literature base to draw upon with an attempt to demonstrate criticality.

Research Question or Hypothesis: 

Based on the context and literature reviewed in the section above, provide a key research question (or hypothesis) that you will attempt to address in your work. The question should not be the Project title. It should be researchable and along with the objectives provide a boundary to provide realistic scope and scale for the project. Make sure you set and then maintain a tight focus for your research. 

Aim and Objectives:

Provide an overall aim for your research and a set of three or four clear objectives for how you intend to achieve your overall aim and address your research questions. Your objectives should provide a platform for the subsequent methods section by enabling you to break your research down into discrete parcels. Your objectives should be measurable and achievable within the time frame of the project. The objectives should be numbered and should use appropriate action verbs (see Bloom's taxonomy) in your objectives.

Methodology: 

You should describe and justify the rationale for your project design. Set out your methods as clearly as you can and try to map them towards achieving your objectives (for some projects it may also be useful to provide a flow chart). Your methods need to state how you intend to collectthe data and/or information (including secondary data) andhow you intend to analyseit. You must justify your choice of data collection and data analysis by reference to the literature. You do not need to include a section on research philosophy in your proposal; you should concentrate on providing details on what you intend to do and why. This will help us determine the feasibility of your project. This section should also include a summary of the key ethical issues (see ethics briefing).