Research Question: What types of technological development is there to achieve a cleaner orbital debris field, and can more be done?
The Final Report will contain the following sections:
- Problem: In 1–2 paragraphs, clearly present the research problem statement.
- Intent: In 1–2 paragraphs, clearly describe what your team did about the problem in the course of this investigation.
- Research Question: Write one research question.
- Hypothesis: Write one hypothesis with the corresponding null hypothesis (for quantitative problems only).
- Literature Themes: In 4–6 paragraphs, describe the major themes of literature on this topic. Answer the following questions in your narrative:
- How prevalent was the problem among existing current research?
- What are other researchers currently doing about this problem?
- What themes exist for how others have resolved this problem, or what are the leading recommendations from current research?
- What was different or similar about the research approach you are taking to address the problem?
- Data Collection and Analysis Plan: In 2–5 paragraphs, precisely describe your data collection and analysis plan. Answer the following questions in your narrative:
- What data, exactly, did you use to evaluate this problem?
- Where, exactly, did the data come from?
- What calculations, exactly, did you complete to organize and understand the data? (for quantitative)
- What, exactly, are the variables (independent and dependent)? (for quantitative)
- What statistical test did you use to test the null hypothesis, and why did you choose that test? (for quantitative)
- What, exactly, were your criteria to reject the null hypothesis? (for quantitative)
- Results:
- For qualitative projects, provide a rich narrative synthesizing the major themes and patterns found in the data analysis.
- For quantitative projects, present the results of your calculations or findings with an accompanying narrative that answers the following questions:
- What are the descriptive statistics for the data set (e.g., mean and standard deviation)?
- What are the inferential statistics for the data set (e.g., t statistic, F statistic, Chi-Square statistic)?
- Were the inferential statistic calculations associated with the null hypothesis test statistically significant (e.g., p < .05)?
- Conclusions:
- What are the conclusions based on your results (e.g, reject or fail to reject the null hypothesis)?
- Were there limitations that affected the study?
- Summarize how your conclusions resolve the hypothesis and/or research question, meet the intent of your research, and finally how the conclusions resolve part of/all of the research question.
- Recommendations: Based upon the conclusions, what are the recommendations?
- What are the recommendations for replicating this research (e.g., What changes should be made)?
- What are the recommendations for future research that would complement this study?
An Example of the research plan will be attached.
and the research design.