Collaborative Community Action

Topic: Primary research report on a problem (or any situation that needs improvement) at Elon and provide a secondary research-informed solution.

Audience: Assume that President Lambert has assembled a task force of students, faculty, staff, and administrators to assess the state of student life at Elon.  As part of their mission, the task force has publicly requested feedback from the Elon population to determine what challenges the community most cares about and how Elon might address those issues. As the first step in the process, they have requested proposals from students that detail the one issue you think is exceptionally important for the Elon community to address.

Method: The class will divide into four groups of five.  Your group will identify problems on Elon’s campus through brainstorming and by combing past and present issues of The Pendulum.  Within your group, you will split responsibilities of (1) researching the problem, and (2) writing the report.  We will discuss collaboration and delegation strategies in class.  Research methods:  observation (if applicable), interview, questionnaire, and/or survey.  See the reserved reading on field research for details.

Written Report: A useful structure for a formal proposal of this kind is located in the

Blackboard section entitled “assignments”

Suggestions: Divide your research tasks and responsibilities for the written report in some equitable way.  Interviews could be conducted by pairs within the team, someone might seek scholarly articles, and another pair could design and distribute a survey, for instance.  One composition strategy could be that each group member could write his/her portion of the proposal and then post it to the group thread on Blackboard.  Once all sections are posted, the entire group will evaluate them and make suggestions for revision, decide on the structure of the proposal, and add transitions or headings as needed.  Whatever the case, this final draft should be posted, read, and approved by the entire group.

Technical Matters

Length: 5-6 pages

Sources: Primary and Secondary Research.

Grading weight: 20%

Documentation: MLA documentation form will be used. Your sources should be cited in-text when you refer to specific content (paraphrases, quotations, etc.) from those sources.  List all external sources in a works cited page.

Review Criteria for Project 2

Collaborative Community Action

Content and Organization Assessment (70 points possible): ______of 70

Grammar and Punctuation (grammar and mechanics have been carefully reviewed and edited) (20 points possible):

0 (many sentence level errors – about one per sentence on average)

5 (sentence level errors of several varieties (punctuation, word choice, etc.) committed very frequently (several per paragraph))

10 (sentence level errors of several varieties (punctuation, word choice, etc.) committed infrequently or few sentence level errors committed frequently

15 (few sentence level errors of a particular variety committed (comma splice errors, for instance))

20 (no errors noted)

Assessment: ____of 20

MLA Citation Formatting (evidence is well documented, following MLA format for in-text citations and References list) (10 points possible):

0 (no in-text citations or bibliography included)

5 (major formatting errors in-text or in the bibliography)

10 (no MLA formatting errors committed)

Assessment: ___of 10

Overall Project 2 grade:_____________of 100

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