Students are required to meet or follow-up with their Faculty Advisor to discuss their ideas for the paper as needed. A final paper and its presentation must be completed before a grade will be awarded.
Proposal: Significance of Problem/Question
Students will write a persuasive argument (two to three pages), supported by published literature, describing/ defending the significance of their chosen question or topic.
Preliminary Review of Literature: Relevance Screening
Students are required to review a minimum of 50 abstracts to determine their relevance to their chosen question or topic. These abstracts must be of peer-reviewed articles and submitted to the program supervisor and GAC.
Quality Assessment and Data Extraction
Students are required to select the 15 most relevant articles from the 50 reviewed abstracts of peer-reviewed articles that are relevant to their topic. They must submit a summary of each of the 15 most relevant articles, including the statistical and/or scientific merit of each.
Findings
The final paper will be a report on the synthesis of these articles, emphasizing their usefulness to the student's question or topic. This report cannot be more than 10 pages and must be organized according to the following outline:
- Title
- Abstract
- Introduction: Describes the selected topic and summarizes the significance
- Body: Summarizes the designs, outcomes, and data analyses of the articles reviewed
- Discussion: Synthesis of the reviewed articles, including the student's interpretation of their relationship to the initial question
- Conclusion
- References