NOTE: Students bear sole responsibility for meeting certain deadlines in this course; these deadlines are stated on the OCTH 790 course timetable. Should a situation arise that precludes meeting a deadline, students must contact the OCTH 790 instructor and discuss options prior to that deadline!

The research project is a collaborative learning experience. Research is a team effort; each group of students working together on a single project will share responsibilities for completing that project and will produce a single research paper to be submitted to their research mentor for evaluation. Following here is an outline for a general approach to the project, and some guidance for organizing the team effort and assuring an equitable division of labor. You should also plan to consult the textbooks for this course and your research project mentor for additional details related to writing the research paper.

The research experience and communicating the research findings will be a dual focus of this course, culminating with an oral presentation of the research findings and the submission of a formal, written research report.

1. Understanding the Project: As soon as possible in the semester (ideally, before or during the first week of classes), teams should schedule a meeting with their mentor to discuss details of their project. At this meeting the mentor will provide some background to the project, including information on both the motivation for the study and the research methods. Once the students understand this background, the mentor will assist them in identifying the topics that would be relevant for the Introduction section of the paper. Teams and mentors together will develop an outline for the Introduction.

2. The Project Contract: Once students understand the scope of the project they should be in a position to organize duties associated with the project. The duties are listed in generic format on the project contract; duties can be divided up any way the team sees fit. This contract represents the agreements that have been made regarding each student's contribution to the project. It does, however, require mentor approval as a way of assuring an equitable division of labor; submit a completed contract to your mentor. The contact is available as either a .pdf file or as a Rich Text Format (.rtf) file suitable for use with most text processing software.

3. The Literature Search: Each team member is required to contribute to the literature search. Use the outline developed for the Introduction to assign topics to team members for the search.

4. Writing the Introduction: There are three main sections to the Introduction: (1) introduce the problem, (2) review the literature, and (3) summarize purpose and hypotheses. Exploring the literature related to the research topic will help to prepare you for understanding research itself, and successfully summarizing the purpose and hypothesis will require a good conceptual understanding of the project.
   • In order to assure a fair division of labor and a good understanding of the project by each team member, each student must contribute to some aspect of the three sections of the Introduction. These sections are defined by the outline developed previously; use the outline to identify student responsibilities for writing; incorporate the outline into the project contract to record the assignment of responsibilities.
   • You should be aware that the content of your group's Introduction may change over the course of the term, as your project evolves. Be prepared to revise the Introduction as your prepare your written report at the end of the term.
   • You should be aware that a common problem in Introductions is they often read as a long list of reports from the literature. The purpose of the Introduction is to guide your reader through the literature - not present an indexed list of all the literature you've read! Cite only those reports that are pertinent to your topic, and explain carefully why each report is worth considering in relation to your questions.

5. Writing the Methods Section: Once the students understand the methods to be used, they can write the relevant parts of this section, usually in three parts: Participants, Instrumentation, and Procedure. Responsibility for writing these sections should be assigned using the project contract.

6. Data Collection: Each student is required to contribute at least 10 hours to the task of data collection.

7. Writing the Results Section: This section includes (1) a written description of the data analyses, and (2) figures and/or tables summarizing the data.

8. Writing the Discussion: This section includes a evaluation and interpretation of the data reported in the previous section. All team members should contribute ideas for the discussion. This section can be written by more than one student, but the subsections should flow smoothly one to the next.

9. Organizing the References: APA style listing of literature cited in the paper.

10. Appendix: Listing of all raw data collected in the course of the project.

11. Making the Research Presentation: A short (15-20 minutes, depending on number of students and complexity of the project) summary of the research project is given by the group at the end of the semester. Tasks include both preparing and delivering spoken parts of the presentation, and preparing visual aids. ALL students are expected to deliver some portion of the spoken presentation.

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