The proposal example that I have chosen was written by Charles Ming Kheng from the graduate school of education at the University of Western Australia. The research proposed is a study to find whether or not an infusion of biology demonstrations within a physics course had any effects on the achievement or attitudes of junior standing college students in Singapore. To gather data, Kheng randomly assigned 120 students (60 male and 60 female) into control and experiment groups. Both groups were to learn the same level and course of physics, except the experimental group were to have biology-infused physics demonstrations within the course. After two weeks, the two groups were to be compared to see the impact the biology had on their achievement and attitudes.

As mentioned above, the topic of the research was effects of biology-infused demonstrations on achievement and attitudes in junior college physics. The research question was “What are the effects of infusing biology examples into physics demonstrations that are based on a constructivist teaching approach?” Kheng also added the following specific research questions: (1) What are the effects of using such demonstrations on physics achievement? (2) What are the effects of using such demonstrations on physics attitudes? (3) Do the effects of using such demonstrations on achievement and attitudes differ across males and females? (4) Do the effects of using such demonstrations on achievement and attitudes differ across ability levels? The type of data needed to answer this question would be reports of acts and behavior since the main goal is to find out if the biology affected their personal achievements and attitudes. To gather this data, the researcher used a modified version from an existing attitudes questionnaire to compare attitudes, and then used a Physics Achievement Test (PAT) to determine if their achievements differed. To then analyze this data, the statistical methods of Pearson r and Rasch were used for the PAT to see if there was any relationship between the students’ achievements when infused or not with biology.

Overall, I thought this research proposal was well written. It had language that was easy to understand, had visuals to represents the way data would be organized, and transitioned nicely from each step to the next.