Biology Homework: Writing Proposals For Those In Need
When writing a Biology Proposal, there are various stages that you proposal needs to cover, in order to receive an outstanding mark:
- Introduce your proposed area of study, and explain its significance, ie. why this is an important area to study. Sometimes proposals will require an abstract, which works in the same way. It’s a brief, usually one paragraph outline of what your study will cover.
- Look at what research has been done in this area already – make good use of electronic journals to do this. If you’re unsure of how to use them, or search them efficiently ask the Biology subject librarian in your academic library. The more current and up-to-date the journals you use, the better, as this shows you’re making good use of up-to-date cutting-edge research. Remember to reference thoroughly with whatever referencing style has been recommended. You ideally need to be showing how your research is different to what has been done before, what is novel, or original about it? It need only be a small difference, but it’s good to find something that has been missed, or not covered in sufficient detail, or not thought about/applied in previous research, and to address this in your research. By doing this, you’re advancing research and showing an element of an original contribution to research, and this will score you higher marks.
- State a clear hypothesis. What are you testing in your research? What are you attempting to prove? It’s worth running this hypothesis by your tutor, BEFORE spending a lot of time researching and writing your proposal. If there are problems with your hypothesis, then your whole piece of work will be wrong. A hypothesis needs to be clearly defined, precise and academically sound and your tutor may help you to tighten this up.
- Next write a methodology. Here you need to describe how you will collect the data you require that will support your hypothesis. Be as precise as you can in terms of: defining the quantity of the sample you’ll use; the time period for your study; the resources you’ll require to carry this out and the techniques you’ll use to analyse your data. Will you have a control project to compare your results to? If so, describe this here.
- Re-cap your hypothesis, and write a prediction as to what you anticipate the outcome of your biology experiment will be, and some justification as to why you believe this will be the case and the implications of this for future research and use.
- Finally remember to include a good bibliography, of all the research you’ve done so far in order to put the proposal together. A good quantity of current (published in the last 3-5 yrs) journal articles help your work to score highly.