Chapter 3: Expectations for IQP Outcomes
To ensure that the objectives of the IQP are achieved it is essential that advisors and students share a common set of expectations for the outcome of the project. Ultimate responsibility for establishing appropriate expectations with respect to the level and scope of work done on IQPs rests with the faculty advisors and should, of course, be communicated clearly to students at the beginning of project work. The following discussion is intended to stimulate thought on this subject and help advisors form their own judgments.
As an IQP is intended to be equivalent to three courses, it would seem that there should be little disagreement that the scope of the work expected from each student should bear some equivalence to what would be expected in three courses, and that the level of difficulty and complexity would be comparable to upper class college level courses and would reflect a similar commitment of time, i. e., 15 hours per week. Our experience has shown that to realize these expectations in practice it is helpful if the objectives of IQPs are multifaceted. There may be one overriding objective but it will be possible to identify, at a minimum, sub goals that can be accomplished at different stages of the project or allocated to different individuals. Failing that, the procedures required to achieve the objectives should be multifaceted in the sense of involving numerous steps, and possibly alternative approaches, so that the efforts of the entire project team will be required to accomplish them. Obviously, if adequate expectations have been fulfilled, the advisor will be able to look at the project group's output and say honestly that, yes, that output could not have been achieved with one or more fewer students.
Experience has also shown the importance of good literature reviews. A topic of substance that is suitable for a college project degree requirement is likely to be one which has attracted the attention of prior investigators. It is very important for students to become familiar with the relevant literature in order to immerse themselves in the topic and to ensure that their work will benefit from knowledge of what has already been accomplished. The literature review should demonstrate that the students have been able to interpret the published prior work for themselves and that they understand its implications. The literature reviews of our best projects are thorough, and suggest that the students have in fact acquired significant mastery of an identifiable field of inquiry.
The project report should have a structure that is appropriate to the topic. The structure employed at many of our off-campus project centers provides a useful framework that can be of benefit, particularly in helping to organize the research and in suggesting aspects that should be included. That structure includes the following sections:
- an abstract and executive summary
- a background section outlining the general nature of the subject under investigation;
- a statement of the specific objectives of the project;
- a literature review as discussed above;
- a methodology section outlining how the project's objectives were achieved;
- a section presenting the results of the research, which would describe any data, survey results or experimental results that have been obtained;
- analysis of the results, and conclusions drawn from that analysis;
- and finally a set of recommendations for policy actions or further research based on the conclusions.
In a given project, some of these sections may be much more important than others, and some may not be appropriate at all. The final report structure will reflect that relative importance.
The writing should be at a professional level: clear, well organized and free of spelling and grammatical errors and awkward expressions.
The methods of analysis utilized in the project should be appropriate to the topic and reflect the practices of other researchers who have conducted similar investigations. Where a given type of analysis is clearly feasible and appropriate, it should be conducted, and conducted correctly whether it involves statistical analysis, cost/benefit analysis, life cycle costing, survey research or any other technique.
It is, of course, important to remember that IQPs must be interactive in the sense that WPI has defined i. e. they should examine "how science or technology interacts with societal structures and values". More specifically IQPs should meet one or more of the educational objectives, originally identified by the Zwiebel Committee in 1972 and presented above in Chapter 2.
Finally, there is the issue of the length and size of the project report. It is axiomatic to say that the number of pages of a report is not the primary determinant of its quality. Moreover, we wish to encourage students to write succinctly, as well as clearly, and certainly wish to discourage them from padding reports, particularly with material copied from other sources. However, if students are to do a thorough job of surveying the literature and describing the multiple steps that they have followed to achieve an objective of some complexity, the result is quite likely to be a report of significant length, far longer than a term paper for a single course, closer to the thirty or so pages per student average achieved by our best projects than the dozen or fewer pages common in the past for the shortest and weakest project reports. It would seem that the appropriate model for IQPs would be that of a thesis or a professional report to a lay audience that is unfamiliar with the literature. Such an audience could not only benefit from a thorough description of that literature, but will require a detailed explanation of the analytical techniques employed and the steps followed to conduct the analysis, to reach conclusions and to make recommendations. An alternate model, that of a journal article addressed to an expert audience already familiar with the literature, not requiring all steps of analysis spelled out in detail, and looking essentially just for the new knowledge provided by the research, would hardly seem to be an appropriate model for undergraduates who are typically not even majoring in the disciplines involved in the study.
Advisors should, logically, require that projects meet their expectations adequately to receive a passing grade and meet them in an outstanding fashion to receive a grade of A. Their grading standards could should conform to those adopted by the faculty in its Resolution on Project Grading Adopted on May 5th, 1994 and presented below in the appendix to this chapter.
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