1. State the research problem, which is often referred to as the purpose of the study.

2. Provide the context and set the stage for your research question in such a way as to show its necessity and importance.

3. Present the rationale of your proposed study and clearly indicate why it is worth doing.

4. Briefly describe the major issues and sub-problems to be addressed by your research.

5. Identify the key independent and dependent variables of your experiment. Alternatively, specify the phenomenon you want to study.

6. State your hypothesis or theory, if any. For exploratory or phenomenological research, you may not have any hypotheses. (Please do not confuse the hypothesis with the statistical null hypothesis.)

7. Set the delimitation or boundaries of your proposed research in order to provide a clear focus.

8. Provide definitions of key concepts. (This is optional.)

LITERATURE REVIEW:

Sometimes the literature review is incorporated into the introduction section. However, most professors prefer a separate section, which allows a more thorough review of the literature.

The literature review serves several important functions:

1. Ensures that you are not ―reinventing the wheel‖.

2. Gives credits to those who have laid the groundwork for your research.

3. Demonstrates your knowledge of the research problem.

4. Demonstrates your understanding of the theoretical and research issues related to your research question.

5. Shows your ability to critically evaluate relevant literature information.

6. Indicates your ability to integrate and synthesize the existing literature.

7. Provides new theoretical insights or develops a new model as the conceptual framework for your research.

8. Convinces your reader that your proposed research will make a significant and substantial contribution to the literature (i.e., resolving an important theoretical issue or filling a major gap in the literature).

Most students’ literature reviews suffer from the following problems:

* Lacking organization and structure

* Lacking focus, unity and coherence

* Being repetitive and verbose

* Failing to cite influential papers

* Failing to keep up with recent developments

* Failing to critically evaluate cited papers

* Citing irrelevant or trivial references