Key things that will get you at least a ‘pass’ in the second assignment Firstly, this is a “professional project” course in an Australian unit, so HDs will be judged against standards of professionalism in Australia. A HD assignment will at least in theory be the kind of thing you could show to an Australian CEO and she or he would say “OK, this looks good, I’ll consider this carefully and get back to you.” As I’ve said to my students in Brisbane, I have Dutch parents and speak and write reasonably well in Dutch. Here in Australia, by working extremely hard on my degree (60 hours a week often) I managed to get HDs in almost every subject I got. English is my first language. However, if I were to go to a Dutch university, and work 60 hours a week, I believe I would get an average of Credits or maybe Distinctions with the same effort. For many of you, English is your second language, and you do not have 60 hours a week to devote to CQU due to your work commitments. You are smart and capable, but this is why it is difficult for you to get HDs at CQU. Now you all are near the end of your degree and we expect that you fully understand things like formatting, referencing, the definition of scholarly articles and critical thinking, how to use spell check and grammar check, what secondary data is as opposed to secondary sources (because you all have completed BUSN20016) and so on. However, I will go over some of these issues again just in case. So, to start off, a project that looks untidy, has many different fonts, spelling errors, referencing errors, is inconsistent in formatting (such as line spacing), and badly organised, is not ‘professional’. If you have ambitions about getting a job in Australia, then this is something you need to be very careful about. So let’s start with structure. Keep it nice and organised so that you tell the research ‘story’ in a single flow. It’s not about writing in fantastic English or using complicated words, but about being consistent, organised. Use the same fonts for major headings (like “introduction” below and “methods” and same line spacing, paragraph spacing etc. ….so that the end result looks something like a research paper that you might see in a journal. (Note that I say looks something like, not IS something like. So, set up your assignment like the HD example on the web with some consistent headings, and maybe numbering, so that your material for your assignment is nicely ‘sorted’ into good sections. You can have more headings…or subheadings. For example some of you for assignment one had your literature review sorted into subheadings. This keeps your material sorted nicely, and makes it easier for the marker to read and understand. 1.0 Introduction 1.1 Definitions and key concepts 1.2 Brief background, including professional context. 1.3 Literature review 1.4 Research Aim and Objectives 1.5 Research Question 2.0 Methods 2.1 General approach 2.2 Population and sampling 2.3 Analytical approach 3.0 Results 4.0 Discussion and conclusion. OK, let’s quickly deal with title. Make the title focused on your project, not “Human Resource Management and Motivation” which could be the title of a textbook. Something that reflects (i.e is closely related to) your SMALL research question like “Pay rates for Brisbane HRM Interns”… Some of you had spelling and grammar errors in your title. This is really a bad idea. Next, let’s look at the executive summary. Have a look at this resource for some advice. http://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/320178/writing-an-executive-summary.pdf If you don’t wish to include a table of contents, it is not essential and you won’t be marked down for it. If you report ends up being 30 pages long (because you have a large amount of references or appendices) then maybe table of contents will help the reader. Now let’s talk about the quality of your language. I’m not expecting ‘research article’ quality. I would like to see statements like “Motivation has found to be a major problem for managers (Source, 2000)” (even though this is in fact bad English grammar) not statements like “Managers all over the world find voluptuous remuneration is a source of pinnacle problems” … SO the first example is MUCH BETTER than the second example. One suggestion I have is that you take your draft to a friend for whom English IS their first language, just to check for the ‘sound’ of it. This is hard for many students working outside their first language to see. This will help you get rid of some mistakes. You can always make them a nice lunch as payment! And remember what I said early in the semester. The ALC is here to help…many of you have not made use of their services, and that is unwise. So, turning to the report itself, the first part of your report will be the introduction to the report (although you can, if you wish, introduce your profession etc as the second part of your report as I did in the example structure above). Note in the assignment HD example I posted a few weeks ago the student wrote: Becoming a professional accountant is a career path in the future as a student of Master of Professional Accounting. This topic is about sustainability report, which is a trend for accounting professionals to prepare and assure sustainability information to the public. At the first part of this report, it will include background of the project, research aim and questions, and literature review. In the other part, the methodology, finding, discussion and conclusion will be explained and explored. Now in fact this has some English errors, not serious ones, in it, but it is clear, introduces the student’s future profession and how the topic fits into that profession. If you wrote “my future profession is a manager in civil engineering and I’m going to write about manufacturing of high tensile steel” I would ask… how does this research fit into your profession? You are going to be a manager, and your job will involve motivating, guiding, administering staff…not actually technical work specifically… The literature review The background and definition of the problems sets up the reader for your actual research. So if you are going to research about the uptake of formal auditing processes amongst NGOs in Cambodia, you will present a literature review talking things like the economic context in Cambodia, the role of NGOs in Cambodia, the importance and prevalence of auditing processes in not-for-profit organisations globally. Your literature review should, ideally, finish with a bit of a survey of the research SPECIFICALLY IN YOUR RESEARCH QUESTION AREA. So here, you would find (if possible) the studies that have looked at the prevalence of auditing in NGOs in Cambodia…. Summarise them briefly. If such studies do not exist, then maybe summarise the prevalence of auditing in NGOs in general, in any country… Then you can say “But research does not yet exist for the prevalence of auditing in NGOs in Cambodia, and this project will fill this research gap”. (This is also not ideal English, but it is absolutely fine for this report. Keep it nice and simple and straightforward  Now, I will be perfectly happy if you have one large section that starts off with your profession, the professional context, raises your research context (like auditing of NGOs in Cambodia) and then goes straight into a full literature review of the field. I do not need you to separate ‘background’ from ‘literature review’. It is absolutely fine for you to do so, but it is also not necessary. Read a few good quality journal articles in the area that you are researching and have a look at how they structure their reports. You will see not every one of them is the same. But all of them give a broad context, then a detailed context, then say something like, “hmmm, the literature covers many things but it does not cover THIS! This is the research gap, and that is why we are going to do this study.” Now you also do not HAVE to have a separate section focused on research aim and objectives. Research aims and objectives are kind of the broad context of your focused research question. So, for the above example the research aim and objectives/justification section could read something like this: “NGOs often receive their income from donors that either are government sources, with high fiduciary standards (Source, 2000), or from individual donors motivated by the desire to do good (Source, 2001). Therefore, NGOs are commonly held to a higher standard than ordinary corporations. Being able to provide good quality auditing to donors is an important part of making NGOs sustainable (Source, 2010). This study thus looks at…” And then follow up with the research questions. If you want to put your research aims in bullet points, that’s fine. Some of you did a really good job with this. Research aims and objectives are like the broader context of your assignment, and your research questions are the SPECIFIC FOCUSED THING YOU ARE GOING TO LOOK INTO. So many of you had submitted to your tutor what really was a ‘research aim’…and your tutors will (hopefully) have said yes, or no… Those of you who wrote direct to me probably got an email back saying “fine, but how are you going to answer a research question in this area with secondary data?” In theory, ANY question can be answered with secondary data, but in reality, secondary data is not available in many areas…so some research questions realistically cannot be answered with secondary data. (We will come to this issue in a minute.) Please also go this site and have a look around: http://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk/being-critical/ Click on things like “being cautious” and “defining terms”… Please read this site. You ARE ALLOWED TO PLAGIARISE PHRASES FROM THIS SITE. Just to emphasise (and this is important) you CAN use the wording that this site suggests, word for word, in your assignment and it will NOT cause you to be punished for plagiarism. In fact it will tend to lead to you producing a BETTER ASSIGNMENT. I don’t want to focus too much on plagiarism, but if you are worried about accidental plagiarism, my suggestion is that you keep two Word files open when you work (both of them Saved of course!!!). One file will be where you paste notes, that may be direct quotes from other sources, and so may be a ‘plagiarism risk’. You can “copy and paste” into this file from other sources, no problems. But you should even on this file mark (Smith, 2000) and Page 15 (or whatever) to show who you got it from and what page you got it from. The second Word file can be where you actually write the assignment in your own words, or paste material from other people but in quote marks and with references (including page numbers). Then, when you upload your assignment, don’t just look at the Turnitin percent, but also look at where the similarity percentages ARE COMING FROM… Remember, I tend to ignore the actual ‘percentage’ score and look for evidence that students have used another source, word for word, without referencing it, and then ask myself “could this have happened by chance?” Now as you will have noticed that one of the criteria for this assignment is “critical literature review”. This is a hard one for students, particularly coming from cultures where to criticise an authority figure (such as an academic) is uncomfortable. Have a look at the Academic Phrasebank (see the link above) under “BEING CRITICAL” for a taste of what language in a critical literature review would be like. However, this means reading material quite carefully and looking beneath the surface. If you just read abstracts of an article, it is hard to really see the strengths and weaknesses of an article. But let me give you some hints: One useful tip in academic writing, is to use language that suggests DOUBT. So in scholarly work, we do not ‘prove’ anything, but merely gather evidence that makes it likely that something is so. So, for example, we cannot “prove” that the planet is warming, but we can merely assemble (rather overwhelming) evidence that it is the case. So in academic writing, use language like “suggests”, “appears” “provides evidence”, “indicates”, and “proposes”… One of the things we like to see in a student’s work is not just the presenting of evidence but the weighing of evidence…this is a good study because, this is a bad study because… So even a statement like “French and Raven’s division of power into five ‘bases’ (1958), blah blah, has stood the test of time” shows that you have thought about whether their work was good or not. (Standing the test of time, for example, can be measured in Google Scholar by the citation frequency in say the last ten years—a few clicks there will get you that information.) A good way to prove you have done critical thinking is to say “Smith (2000) argues X, but Jones (2001) disputes this by showing…” Or “Smith (2000) and Jones (2001) agree that…” In both cases, it ‘proves’ you have read the articles critically enough to see differences (in the first case) or similarities (in the second case). Integrating more than one reference into a particular discussion or having more than one reference attached to a particular sentence (as long as they are the RIGHT references, that is, really about the topic) is also a marker of HD quality work… The reason for this is that it is evidence that you’ve read the two and seen the links/similarities between scholar X and Scholar Y’s work, and generally synthesising different schools of work is what we look for in top end work. So for a marker, it is easy to see very very quickly whether you have read widely and properly or not. Many students gave us 15 references (the absolute minimum) in their Assignment One…which is a ‘pass’ (not a distinction)…but then they only referred to each of these ONCE….which suggests they merely read the abstract, and were just making sure they “had 15 references”. Some students referenced articles they had not read (and I knew they had not read it because the article they referenced DID not have anything to do with what they wrote, or did not conclude what the student claimed it did.) Some included references in their reference list that were NOT referred to in the report itself, and some included references in the report that were NOT included in the reference list. Both of these are issues that I really look upon very negatively because they suggest either a] carelessness or b] cheating…neither of which is very professional. So make sure you do a last check on your references (and see section on referencing later). Research question We are not expecting you to produce something that is just as good as a journal article. That is not realistic. Some of you asked such big questions in your project plan, that you made it sound like a PhD in scope. In fact, these were questions that not even a single PhD project could answer in three years. We only expect you to answer a minimum of ONE very small research question, using secondary data. We don’t expect you to get the data yourself, but to use data that has already been collected. A big research question is “what motivates managers to work hard?” A small research question is “is there a relationship between level of salary offered to managers and the level of responsibility described in job advertisements?”) So produce a minimum of one small research question that you are able to answer with an existing dataset. (See section on secondary data). Methods section The Methods chapter will contain two elements. One is the broad approach. You will be able to get some idea of what KIND OF things to write by looking at the methods sections of other papers. Some of the terminology is standard, so don’t be worried about plagiarism by using similar WORDS to other researchers. Things like “qualitative”, “positivism”, “research approach” and so on are common technical words with specific meanings, and if you can use them accurately, that’s great. The second part of the Methods chapter is the particular approach you took, and I will give some more details on this in the following two sections. The only other thing I’d suggest for the Methods section is that you just make sure that you plainly and simply tell me what you did…how you did it. I’ll just speak briefly here about Methods. Secondary data, QUALITATIVE I have generally warned students against using qualitative analysis in this unit for a good reason. Qualitative secondary data (for example, a gallery of photographs, or a collection of newspaper articles on the Global Financial Crisis between 01/01/2000 and 31/12/2010 in Newsweek magazine) requires you to have a high degree of sophistication in reading (at least for word-based data) and writing. As I’ve said many times, qualitative analysis is not simply doing a literature review. If I was doing a research project in Dutch (see my comments above) I would not do a qualitative analysis because my Dutch is not sophisticated enough to see hidden patterns in language for example. But if you DO want to do a qualitative analysis, here are some suggestions: A] Define how you got the data clearly in a way that other people (e.g. the marker) can understand. Like “The New York Times archives was searched for the years 2000 to 2015 using the search terms ‘ethics’ and ‘ethical’ and ‘audit’ and ‘auditor’, and then the results were further reduced by only including those articles that were written about Fortune 500 company performance. Opinion articles were not included.” Or: “The Auditors Journal of Australia archives were searched using the terms x, y and z, for the period 1990 to 2000, and separately for 2001 to 2017.” You need to define your search in such a way that the results are not too many. If you have to analyse 500 articles…that’s impossible. So try and create a search that only results in 20 articles or so to analyse. B] Tell us how you analysed them. So, have a read of qualitative data approaches, and make sure you are familiar with terms like ‘themes’ and ‘coding’. It is possible to use this kind of qualitative data and give it a quantitative spin. You can for example sort your articles into the ones that mention auditing as NOT necessary and ones that mention it as ESSENTIAL, and count them up and report the differences in counts for different years for example. That is not true qualitative analysis, but that kind of simple approach will still get you (at least) a pass. What will not get you a pass is if you simply just go and find some literature from whatever place and then write about it to answer the research question. Secondary data, QUANTITATIVE Listen and watch the youtube clip on the Moodle site about secondary data one more time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgAq0I_si_k So your methods section if you are doing a quantitative approach will include phrases like: “Data was sourced from www.aaaaaa.com site, with Excel databases for the years 2014, 2015 and 2016 included in the analysis.” Please include all the details here. High marks will be given to students who have really understood research processes (and for this you will need to be comfortable with those chapters in your research methods books), but pass marks for this section will go to students who clearly and simply explain what they did. Please don’t lie about what you did. If you lie, and I pick it up, you will fail. Then present the findings of your analysis. Here you can simply present numbers and charts, and simple statistics. “The rate of X rose by 15% between 2002 and 2015. You can see that that highest rate of X appeared in 2012 just after the Global Financial Crisis.” Some simple charts can summarise things. Averages (means) and standard deviations are good. High marks here will go students who attempt actual statistics (like T tests, ANOVAs or regressions) but you can get credit and distinction marks simply by doing a clean, tidy, and clear job of presenting the results and showing that you have THOUGHT ABOUT THE RESULTS and thought about reasons why things may have turned out the way they did (like in the above example with the Global Financial Crisis). Discussion and conclusion The discussion section is not easy to write, not even for experienced researchers. We are not looking for miracles here. Students writing at high distinction standards will have sentences like this: “Our findings contrast with the results of previous research by Smith (2000) and Jones (2004) who found xyz. Instead, this study found abc. This is possibly because of ……” So in this example, the student will have drawn on the articles that provide the aims and background to the assignment and contrasted the findings of those articles with the analysis the student has done him or herself. In this section you can also include ‘limitations’. Limitations are the things that could have been improved about your study (so, you are criticising your own work—this is a sign of ‘critical thinking’). These criticisms could include “a larger dataset would help” and “using regression analysis and including age and gender would help” and “doing further research that would enable x, y and z variables to be included in the analysis would help”. I’ve just written these examples to show what kind of weaknesses there might be in your study: a small sample, limited variables, limited analysis. Finally, the discussion and conclusion can include recommendations for your profession. So the context of your study was (for example) “management in engineering” and your future profession is being a manager in civil engineering. Your discussion and conclusion can include sentences like “The study shows x. This indicates that managers in civil engineering need to….” Finally, references Referencing properly is easy, yet the majority of students got it wrong…and this is really really surprising at this late stage of your degree. I’m just going to give some examples of proper APA referencing, but if in doubt, see the ALC: Nelson-Jones (2005) stated that “helpers perform different roles from those of counsellors” (p. 7). “Helpers perform different roles from those of counsellors” (Nelson-Jones, 2005, p. 7). Secondary source (different from secondary data!!!): Tyler (1961) argues that “counselling focuses on helping people use existing resources” (as cited in Nelson-Jones, 2005, p.4) Two authors: Nelson-Jones and Smith (2005) or if in brackets, “…of counsellors” (Nelson Jones & Smith, 2005) Three or more authors: Nelson-Jones et al (2005) or (Nelson-Jones et al, 2005) As to the reference list, remember to put them alphabetically and, here’s some samples of book chapters, books and journal articles: Book, one author: Murphy, E. (2007). Essay writing made simple. Sydney, Australia: Pearson Education. Book chapter, one author: Brett, E. A. (1996). The classification of posttraumatic stress disorder. In B. van der Kolk, A. McFarlane & L. Weisaeth (Eds.), Traumatic stress: The effects of overwhelming stress on mind, body and society (pp. 17-128). New York, NY: Guilford Press. Journal article: Webster, M. A. (2008). Restoring self-compassion: A case study. The Australian Journal of Counselling Psychology, 9(1), 17-27. Note the use of italics for the names of journals and books (not the name of articles). One thing that international students can struggle with is understanding what is the first name (the ‘given’ name, which should be initialised like M. A. in the last example above for ‘journal article’) and what is the author’s last name. Now my full name is Olav Titus Muurlink. So in formal English, you would refer to me as “Mr Muurlink” or “Dr Muurlink” (so Honorary Title, and then Last Name Appearing), while in a reference this would be: Muurlink, O. T. So don’t include first names as last names. If you were to reference me as Olav, T. M (2010), that would look (to your marker) quite silly and careless. Here’s a resource from which I took most of the above examples from: https://www.acap.edu.au/assets/CurrentStudents/Student-Services/Learning-support/Study-resources-and-links/Quick-Guide-to-referencing-APA6.pdf Final comments to ensure that you do pass this assignment Very early in the term, I posted onto the Moodle site a file linked to the picture of the cat, which showed what students could do to ‘fail’ this unit. Many students have done three of the four things that I said you SHOULD NOT DO. Some did all four of these things. It’s very important that you do not do any of these four things from now on, otherwise failure is certain. There are two primary things that I will expect from students, otherwise they will not pass: 1] The use of secondary data. Failure to do so will be mean the assignment will be given a fail. This unit is not just another unit in which students write an essay or report. It’s a chance to show off that you have some understanding of research processes. 2] A professional attitude to completing the project. This means, paying attention to detail, such as reading the above report and doing your best to avoid silly mistakes. I do NOT expect wonderful research reports that can be published in journals. This unit is called ‘professional project’. I want students to graduate with an understanding of the basics of ‘research thinking’ and how to write a reasonably professional report. Many students are panicking and upset about the marks that they got for their assignment. Let me assure the students that those students who did an honest job for their first assignment but ended up getting 40 to 50%, and who respond by reading the above carefully WILL NOT FAIL THIS UNIT. This is an independent research project, to some degree and we are expecting you to do this work ‘indepenently’. Otherwise we would just tell you exactly what you have to do…but that would not be the point of this unit. Anyway, I promised to get this report up this afternoon and it is already dark! Take care and good luck. Olav, unit co-ordinator.