Teaching Writing- The Paper Proposal

Teaching research and writing at the college level has been interesting.  I am having to learn to switch from my mode of writing about literature to writing purely research based papers about other academic disciplines.  I am enjoying what I'm doing but I will admit, I miss teaching literature.  I'm trying to figure out how, in the future, I can incorporate some literature into my courses.

As I go I'm creating my own resources to facilitate the learning process for my students.  I've started to post some of these resources on my Teachers Pay Teachers store.  If you're a high school teacher preparing your students for college and teaching them how to conduct academic resources these should be very useful to you.  They are also of course great for first year writing programs at the college level.

The first piece of my research paper with my students is a paper proposal. In the proposal my students must do several things:

1. Introduce their topic and its significance- i.e. why do they want to research this topic and what they hope to accomplish with their research
   
2. Identify 1-3 research questions on which to focus their research
   
3. State their intended audience- i.e. who will benefit from this research, who are they trying to reach
   
4. Describe their proposed methodology- i.e. how do they intend to conduct this research

By going through this process I find my students become much more focused and are better prepared to actually complete the research required for either a project or research paper.

To save you some time I've put my informational sheets, assignment sheets, and rubrics in a handy packet for you to purchase at Teachers Pay Teachers.

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