Group Project Reports

Some tips on writing up your group project report.

This write-up should be written as if it were a research report to be read by an informed linguistic audience. You should not write it as if it were just going to be read by the instructor of your class. You should make every effort to explain your study clearly, explaining the rationale, methods, design and results as clearly as possible.

Two additional features that are expected in this write up are the following

1. Comments on what you consider to have been the most effective and the most problematic aspects of your study - what (if anything) would need to be improved if the study were to be done again.

2. An additional page, to be handed in with the write-up, which describes the contribution of the different group members to the project. This list should be agreed upon by each group member, and should ideally be signed by each group member. Contributions to the project can be from a wide range of areas, including but not limited to: aspects of the planning of the research, reading and reporting on relevant literature, designing and setting up of tests, creation of experimental materials, recruiting and running subjects, organization and analysis of data, writing up of findings. If the group is unable to agree on this section, then individuals may submit individual explanations of their contribution to the project.

Although it is expected that individuals will be responsible for specific aspects of the write up of the project, it is expected that group members will review and edit the contributions of other group members, in order to improve the quality of the combined report. A group report which is just a stapled-together combination of independent write-ups is not a good group report.

There are no length guidelines for the report. The report should be as long as it needs to be in order to convey the needed information and findings.

Abstract

This should give a brief summary of what your study investigates, how it does so, and what its main findings are. Comments on its significance are also appropriate here. This should be fairly short: 100-250 words approximately.

Introduction

This section should situate your study in the background of other relevant research, and should explain the rationale for and significance of the study you conducted. Discussion of other relvant literature is appropriate here.

Detailed discussion of design, predictions and results

In many publications in experimental fields there are very specific guidelines for how research papers should be organized - e.g. experiments should be described in the order methods, results, discussion. This organization is sometimes the most effective way to explain the research, but sometimes it is not the most appropriate organization of the paper. You should organize your discussion in such a way that it will be most easily understood by your readership.

Some topics that you are likely to want to discuss include the following:

• Rationale for the design of your study.
• Specific details of the design of the study.
• How the design of the study is similar to or different from related research
• Specific predictions for your study: what predictions would lead you to draw what conclusions?
• Details of subjects
• If you ran an experiment, how it was run (using what experimental tools)
• Analysis of data, both qualitative and quantitative, with statistical analyses where appropriate (help is available for this)
• Discussion of results - to what extent were the predictions confirmed or not confirmed? What can explain the results that you observed? Are there additional unexpected findings?

Help is also available if you have questions about how best to graphically display your data.

Conclusion and Suggestions for Further Study

In this part of the paper you should describe the conclusions that you believe can be drawn from your research. It is worthwhile to briefly state what evidence allowed you to reach these conclusions.

In this part of the paper it would also be very useful to discuss any aspects of the research that you feel need to be improved, and would need to be incorporated into a future study. In addition you can discuss any new questions that are raised by your research -- these may be questions that would not have occurred to you before you started on this research.

Bibliography

List all works cited in the paper here.

Contact information for the authors.

Appendix

Contribution of individual group members to the project (see details above). This should be agreed upon by the group.