Assignment 4: IDEAs: Due Sunday 11:59 pm (EST) Last week you narrowed your list to a specific few topics and you created brief elevator speeches designed to elicit feedback from your colleagues as to the feasibility of each prospective topic. For this week and with everyone’s feedback in hand, consider if you want to keep, dismiss, or modify any of those topics. For each one, create an IDEA paper. See attached for a sample IDEA paper from a different course and note the headings and description for each section (below). In a separate document for each topic, create corresponding IDEA papers that are about the length you see in the sample. – Title: This is a direct, engaging, and representative title, typically not more than 10-15 words. – Problem Statement: This is likely to be the largest section, potentially taking up to half of your paper. The first sentence should immediately grasp the reader’s attention. Tell your audience immediately the core component driving the potential study. The rest of the first paragraph should be a balance of basic reference material supporting your assertion that what you said in the first sentence really matters. You will then use another one or two paragraphs to go into some more depth about the topic with the perspective that you need to convince your reader that this is an important topic. Keep in mind that this isn’t intended to be a comprehensive literature review–just a highlight of the main points with perhaps a small bit of historical context. In a full research proposal, what you are putting in this section now will transform into a comprehensive literature review. – Project Goals: This section should be an itemized list of goals for the project. You are conveying to your reader what you hope to get out of the process of potentially conducting a study on this topic. If you can only come up with one goal, you probably  haven’t thought enough about the topic (or it’s a poor topic and you should consider revising it). If you are identifying more than five or so goals, you might think about combining goals that are similar or removing goals that might be valid, but not necessarily helpful for the vision you are laying out for this potential study. When you transition to a full research proposal, these goals can be used to help guide the formal development of research questions and hypotheses. – Relevance / Significance: Elaborating on the “why should I care” points for your reader in this section and speak to how your itemized goals relate to a real-world issue or concern. This should be about one, and not more than two paragraphs at most. – Research Approach: This section is a brief statement that is likely to be a paragraph at most that details how you might go about conducting a study on the topic you are writing about and with the goals you indicated. This is not intended to be a comprehensive overview of an entire sampling procedure and research methodology– its purpose is to quickly explore opportunities to conduct this potential research. If you cannot identify a research approach that seems valid and feasible now, consider how difficult it will be to develop specific, objective, and measurable goals in the formal research proposal.
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