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main pagecurrent December 28, 2007
The important thing to remember is that your project must follow requirements specified in the RFP and apply research to a practical problem. To be “practical,” your project must address a real problem or issue that real people need solved. Your solution(s) must be supported by research findings, including both primary research (that you conduct yourself) and secondary research (findings other people have published).
1. Study a Research Question Relevant to the Electronic Portfolio Project
2. Follow-up Research from the NSF Grantwriting Project
4. Study Electronic Editing in Industry
1. Study a Research Question Relevant to the Electronic Portfolio Project
Project Type: Research-based, requiring survey and/or interviews, plus design analysis
Client: Dr. Norman, for the UAH English Dept. and (possibly) UAH Career Services (Rick Shrout, Director)
In Brief: The whole class will work on a project involving constructing electronic portfolios for job search. Numerous research questions will arise associated with this project, and students may choose to pursue one or more of these as their major research project.
Possible Topics:
2. Follow-up Research from the NSF Grantwriting Project
Project Type: Research-based, textual analysis, and (possibly) interviews
Client: Dr. Norman, for the UAH English Dept. and Office of Sponsored Programs
In Brief: In spring 2007, the whole class worked on a project that analyzed successful and unsuccessful NSF grants by UAH grantwriters. The results of that research are available, and will be publishable once follow-up research is completed. The analytical method we found most successful for discriminating successful from unsuccessful grants was discourse analysis. Completely unsuccessful was close stylistic analysis following standards of clear writing. Betty Bolté, who did the stylistic analysis, may be interested in participating in followup research. Kathy Bond did the discourse analysis. Both of their final reports, and their detailed analyses of proposals, are available for review. Materials for the 2007 project are available online.
Discussion: In 2007, the UAH Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP) asked us to research grantwriting for the National Science Foundation (NSF) with a view to determining why UAH has a low success rate with NSF grants, compared to other comparable universities and to other kinds of grants. They supplied us with five successful and five unsuccessful NSF grants (one of the unsuccessful was a resubmission with very little changed). In addition to close analysis of these grants, we studied the following research questions.
a. For non-native speakers (NNS) is the role of first-language interference in unsuccessful grant-writing? Answer, probably not, but see Kathy Bond's report.
b. How much of a grant's success or failure is due to proofreading and the presence or absence of surface errors? Answer, very little, but see Angel Copas' report.
c. How well do the NSF evaluation criteria describe actual winning/losing features? Answer: advice to all unsuccessful proposals boiled down to addressing the criteria more fully and directly. Comprehensive edit analysis and revision for five proposals is available.
d. Have any published research projects answered questions and established methods that we can build on? Answer, no, but there is a frequently cited article by Susan Finger, linked at the NSF project site. It is out-dated but has good advice for NSF grantwriters.
3. Follow Up on a 501 Project
Project Type: Depends on the project
Client: Same as for 501 project.
In Brief: Apply recommendations of a 501 project, your own or someone else’s. May involve both editing a document and writing a report about it.
Project Type: Research-based, requiring survey and/or interviews
Clients: An industry manager or writer who needs to guide manuscripts through an electronic editorial review process. Dr. Norman will locate an appropriate client if someone wants to pursue this.
In Brief: Research how one or more companies use electronic editing as part of the review cycle. It would be helpful to use Margaret Zaice's ADTRAN internship research report as a starting point.
Document Link: Zaice Report on PDF Writers
Discussion: Zaice's internship supervisor, Robin Potts, wanted Zaice to find a cheap alternative to Adobe Acrobat Writer for allowing engineers to edit documents being reviewed in PDF format. Zaice studied the options and recommended the Jaws PDF Editor. Along the way, she discovered that what needed further study was whether and how people use electronic editing, when it is available. She found a series of articles by David Dayton showing that even editors tend to resist electronic editing, with one study showing 62% of editors surveyed saying they seldom or never use electronic editing (Dayton 2003). Dayton studied how editors use electronic editing. A followup to Dayton by Lanier (one of your required outside readings) studied how subject matter experts (SMEs) at one company responded to electronic editing. A student study might replicate the Dayton study (working with technical writers and editors), or the Lanier study (working with SMEs at a company), or design a new one combining the two approaches.