Capstone Project: Methodology and Findings

Task:

Three graded papers (referred to as WA for Written Assignment) are due during Module 1. Your mentor will provide feedback, grades, and guidance to ensure you are starting off in the correct direction and are proposing a study that is doable, that is, that when it is time to collect data, you can implement your plan.

You will post all three papers to their respective assignment links in Module 1 by the due dates on the Course Calendar. If you have questions at any time, communicate with your mentor via the Private Student–Mentor Forum.

Problem Statement: Formulate the focus of your project: for example, the setting as well as the unit within that setting, potential sample(s) of respondents, and, most important, the specific problem that will be addressed. Make sure you have as much access to that setting and to your potential sample respondents as needed. Be sure that you have permission from the appropriate people in the setting to conduct the project.

Literature Review: Based on your problem statement, create the literature review for the first draft of the capstone paper. If you have already completed this for MNP-511 and wish to use that document, be sure to update it for items published since the original literature review was developed.

Methods: Based on your problem statement, design your plan for collecting data. Decide what kind of study it will be, what the project looks like at its broadest, and what it seeks to do. With that design in mind, formulate how you will gather and analyze data including your data collection tool or source, how you will distribute your data collection tool if doing a survey, how respondents will return their responses, and intended sample of respondents. If you have already developed the methods to be used through the MNP-511 proposal, obtain approval for these. If you will be pursuing something other than what you wrote about in the earlier proposal, it will be necessary to develop the new methods to be used for the project and ensure that they are approved by the mentor. Be sure, in any case, to label this as the Methods section.

By the due date in the Course Calendar, complete the following part of your Capstone Project. Make sure you have reviewed the Module 2 Commentary, which includes further specifics on what should be discussed in this section of your paper.

Findings: Gather and analyze data that will provide perspective on, or help in solving, the problem that the project addresses.

Write the Findings section of the paper. Make sure your findings tie back to and enlighten your problem statement.

At this point you have essentially completed a draft of the capstone paper with feedback and grades from the mentor provided along the way on each section of the paper. In short, if you have followed the guidelines described for Weeks 1–9, you should have the project paper in reasonably good order at this point. You should now provide the mentor with a draft copy of the entire paper using the Written Assignment 5: Capstone Paper First Draft link in Module 5. As part of the complete paper, you will now be writing the Conclusions, Recommendations, and Limitations sections of the paper.