Thank you for submitting your research proposal for refining UBC’s COGS 303 course into a general year 1 course. This proposal is very interesting and provides a good overview of an area that could use improvement. Please find below my thoughts and recommendations:
Overall document: This proposal provides a well written description highlighting the need for UBC to provide a critical thinking course for first-year students. This document is neatly organized into distinct segments with each section’s title highlighted which makes the document clear and allows the reader to clearly identify the components of the proposal.
Introduction: The introduction is clear, provides a good description of the current state and clearly describes deficiencies that can be improved. The third sentence [“Knowing how to think …”] could be written more concisely, as it did not flow well while reading through. I suggest taking out the unnecessary adjectives (i.e. “vastly”, “simply”) and/or perhaps removing the phrase “many times greater than any one person can possibly contain within its brain”. Removing these may help the sentence flow better and create more impact with your reader.
Statement of Problem: This section could be written more clearly – It begins with “it would be more valuable …” but doesn’t end with what it would be more valuable than. It may add coherence by breaking this thought up into two or three sentences:
- It would be valuable to have a course in critical thinking,
- Such a course does exist,
- It would be more inclusive and beneficial to be formatted into a first-year class.
Proposed solution: This explains that the current third-year course could be pared down to be more acceptable for a first-year undergrad course or split up between two courses, which are both plausible solutions. I would like to suggest an alternative solution may be to have an entirely new first-year course without having to dismantle the pre-existing course.
Scope: The questions are clearly defined by using the numbered list, and they are related to the proposed solutions. Speaking to my suggested solution above, it may be useful to see if an appropriate critical-thinking class is currently being offered at any other institutions.
Methods: This section is very concise. It explains step-wise what the methods are, well done.
Qualifications: This section is very well written. You explain the benefits of taking this course, and compare it to another course that you had taken in the past. This parallel example provides a good context as to where you are coming from as a researcher and provides a good platform from which to begin your investigation and analysis.
Conclusion: A nice strong finish! Well done.
Leave a Reply