Your final report should include the following components:

• Title Page

• Table of Contents
• Abstract
• Introduction (definition of the problem)
• Background (literature review)
• Research Plan (methodology)
• Results of Study (analysis)
• Recommendations
• References

You may use one or a variety of methods to collect information. You may also develop your own instruments for gathering data.

An outline or narrative paragraph about your project should be posted by class time on March 28th for commentary.

On April 11th, we will discuss how to turn a research report into a 10-minute presentation using either PowerPoint or the Web.

The final report will be due on April 25th, on which date you and your teammate will give a ten-minute presentation with the PowerPoint slides or web site.

This is a suggested outline of our Analytical Report

Analytical Report Project:                                                                                             March 27, 2008

Association between family structure and education aspiration across race
Maction Komwa and Anh Duong

Introduction and problem definition
The research will look at variables that contribute to our understanding between the family structure and education aspiration amongst undergraduate college students.  We will explore the effect of family composition and parental involvement on student’s education aspirations and their academic achievement. 

Literature Review
We will review relevant literature that describes similar topics to identify evidence related to the association between family structure and education aspirations amongst college students.
Readers: Students and other Faculty members who are in the education program will be considered as our first readers. Our colleagues from this class also participate as our secondary readers.

Research Goals and methodology
Our main research goal is to evaluate if there is a correlation between college student’s family structure and their academic aspirations after college.

Our research will be focus on this hypothesis:
Parent’s involvement in their children’s school activities has a positive and long term effect on student’s academic aspiration.  
In order to explore our hypothesis, we will use a questionnaire that will be self-administered by a sample of 20 students (see attached proposed questionnaire).  Our participating students will come from ENG410 class. We anticipate no risk or harm to arise from this research. Students will be required to appropriately choose one option from our questionnaire without including their names on the question survey.  Students will take approximately 3-5 minutes to complete the survey. We will collect data on socioeconomic demographics such as gender, age, race and parental education will be collected. Second part of our data will be on family structure including parental status, number of siblings, parent’s involvement in student’s school work and activities during the student’s elementary school, and parents monitoring of student’s school work and other activities after school. Finally we will ask students to indicate the level their academic achievement using the GPA scale and their aspirations after finishing college.

Data analysis
We will analyze our data using SPSS software.  We will run multiple statistical models with student’s academic aspiration and grades as our dependent variables. Our independent variables will include: social demographics data, parental involvement and monitoring of student’s school work and other activities.

Results
We will present our findings through a presentation in class
Conclusion
Our conclusions will also be tabled for discussions - and make necessary recommendations
Reference