Research Project Report: Structure, Guidelines, and Key Requirements

• Provide a problem statement.

• Brief outline of methodology adopted.

• Main findings

• Principal conclusion

• Explanation or definition of some technical terms.

• Some historical facts

• Brief review of previous research/studies to define problem statement.

• Draw some relevant facts that align well with the principle of your project.

• Show why this project is important.

• Outline the aim, objectives, and research questions of your project.

• Provide a layout of the paper with a brief intro for what each section contains.

Note! Some of the words you may use here are: in the past research has focused on…… this project/study will endeavour to show …

Demonstrate your research skills in identifying and reviewing principal literature within the recent 5years of your project area by:

• Reviewing the past and current debate around what is being researched relevant to your project.

• analysing the current literature around your project.

• Show what are the findings relevant to your project.

• What are the research gaps that are worthy to pursue further? Your literature review should land well by clearly highlighting those research gaps leading to the aims, objectives, and research questions of your report.

Note! You may use expressions such as: It remains unclear why… The work of Smith (2024) shows that …. Although Smith (2024) argues that …. the findings of Wing and Mvalo (2023) show that…. The literature review has revealed that…..

Think about the scope of your project in terms of the research gaps, (or research questions), aims, and objectives you have already identified.

• How can these be achieved?

• What is the scope of experiment/investigation you want to apply or adopt?

• What sort of data do you need and how and where do you get this data?

• What tools or methods do you need to get or collect?

• Show a clear rationale of the choices of your methods or tools for your experiment/investigation.

• What about the technique you adopted in analysing this data?

• Explain your ethical consideration and how you have addressed this.

Note! Do not spend time defining what is qualitative, quantitative, deductive, inductive? However, explain how these methodological choices and approaches have been applied in your project experiment/investigation in collecting and analysing data. Depending on the nature of your project (which will be different from each other), you can express in any way that suits or describes best for the methods or tools you have adopted. However, make sure that you write it in past tense because you are writing what you did and not what you will do. You may wish to write the experimental or investigational flow-chart showing the first test of experiment or phase of investigation and then how it linked to the next till the end. You could also show the methods you adopted first which linked to the next and then the end. For example, you may have adopted a mixed method where you start with an investigation leading to experiment. You may start with the survey, questionnaires, and/or in-depth interviews. The results you obtained from the first stage, will lead you into designing an experiment that may have Test 1, Test 2…..Test n. Remember to rationalise your choice of methods, approaches and/or experiments

• Show the principal results from your experiment/investigation in either table, diagrams, charts, etc

• Explain the meaning of each of the results

• Make judgement of the results in reference to: o your defined objectives and research questions (research gaps)

o literature review you conducted (are there any differences, similarities, contradictions, emerged ideas?)

• what are the principal outcomes of your discussion? o Any emerged ideas observed?

o What do these results tell?

Note! You may use expressions such as: Although the work of Banda (2022) revealed that ….. this study has shown that ….. The differences could have been because…. The findings of this study clearly show that ….

• Limitations

• Recommendations

Note! You may use expressions such as: This study was limited by….. The findings of this project indicate the following recommendations