Worksheet 1.

4: Identifying your research objectives

Task 1: Brainstorming Read your research problem and research questions again and think about these questions: What are my aims in this research project? Why do I want to carry out this project? What am I trying to achieve? Write down all the things you think of.

Task 2: Identifying research objectives Think in detail about these three important questions: 1. What is this research work for? 2. What am I supposed to do during my research work? 3. What am I supposed to achieve? Have a clearly set-out statement of what you want to achieve in your research work. It should be consistent with the research problem you have formulated. Fill in your answers in the left column of document 1.4 Suggestion: Think of the different part of your research project: problem definition,
diagnosis, design, implementation, evaluation.

Task 3: General and specific actions Write in the right column of document 1.4 the actions you will need to take to accomplish your goals. When you have written this down, try to identify those answers that are related to specific actions (mark them in a red colour) and those related to general actions (mark them in green). For example: - Specific action = Make questionnaires / Process test results - General action =Distinguish significant variables and give feedback to the field of practice Suggestion: Use the verbs in the infinitive Save your filled in document 1.4 in your portfolio in the folder 'Part1Thesis_proposal' - subfolder 'documents' Task 4: Formulating general and specific research objectives Formulate the general and specific objectives taking into account the actions to be performed and using the most suitable verbs to state specific actions: e.g. to identify, to describe, to analyse, to demonstrate, etc. You can find an example here. General objectives

Specific objectives

Task 5: Self- check Check if the objectives are related to the research problem. If they are well related to the research problem, edit your objectives to make sure you have stated them in a clear, accurate and correct way. Write down your objectives. Additional task: To make sure your research objectives are clear enough, you can ask someone who doesnt know a thing about your research topic, to read the aims you have formulated. By this task you can verify the clearness of your formulation.

My research objectives
General objectives

Specific objectives