Senior Research Project

RELS 490: Senior Research Project Guidelines

Completion of a senior research project in RELS 490 with a course grade of C or better satisfies a number of requirements for graduation, including the major, oral, and computer competencies for students majoring in Religious Studies. RELS 490 is also designated as an Information Literacy Intensive (ILI) course within the Integrative Liberal Studies (ILS) program; students must have two ILI designated courses to graduate. Finally, the project that you complete for this course qualifies as Undergraduate Research (UGR); with the approval of the departmental faculty, students who present and publish their research in appropriate venues are eligible for designation as University Research Scholars. Thus, your project should display your skills in finding, evaluating, using and properly citing and documenting information – textual, digital, or material – appropriate to the academic study of religion. It should allow you to demonstrate your abilities to locate and assess information sources, to develop appropriate research strategies, to apply one or more methodological approaches appropriate to religious studies, to offer original or insightful interpretations based upon the evidence collected, and to develop and defend a thesis, both in writing and in oral presentation.

These guidelines provide the basic framework for your research and writing, but you will need to utilize other resources as well. The most important resource is your departmental faculty advisor. You may also require the expertise of a faculty member outside of the department depending on your topic. Secondly, you should learn to utilize the various resources available in the library or online – a good place to start is with the Information Literacy Intensive website. Other useful websites are noted elsewhere in these guidelines. Finally, the Department of Religious Studies website and the Moodle site for this course have links to student learning outcomes and the assessment rubrics that will be used by the faculty to evaluate your project; you should be familiar with the goals and criteria outlined in these assessment tools.

The information presented assumes that your project will be a written thesis, but students may petition the department chair to present their research in alternative ways if these are better suited to the project topic. In any case, the research and presentation for such projects should be equivalent to the criteria discussed here.

Topic

The first question that you must answer is what topic you wish to pursue. Certainly, your research will be more enjoyable if you choose a topic that excites and interests you, but you should also consider your ability to locate and research materials, to articulate a clear and defendable thesis based upon available materials, and to complete your project in the allotted time frame. Obviously, topics should be academic and not theological in nature and intent.

As you consider an appropriate topic, you should also think about what resources you will need and how you will obtain these. Will you need to travel to archives or to other libraries? Will you need to perform field research (e.g., participant observation)? Time constraints or funding issues (e.g. for travel) may impact your ability to pursue certain topics.

Research

The Information Literacy website at Ramsey Library is an excellent place to begin your research since it offers information about locating, evaluating, and citing resources as well as guidelines on how to create an effective research strategy. Your initial research efforts should demonstrate your abilities to (1) use the library’s online catalog to locate material by author, title, subject, or keyword; (2) utilize the research databases available at the library’s website; (3) request books and other materials through ABC Express or ILL if appropriate; and (4) use the resources available in the reference section of the library. Consult with a member of the library staff or with your faculty advisor if you have any problems or questions.

Since RELS 490 is an ILI designated course, you will be expected to (1) find information presented in different formats; (2) evaluate information presented in different formats; and (3) integrate information from different sources into your project (adapted from the ILI Student Learning Outcomes, #1-3). This means that you must utilize resources that are not available online – you cannot meet the expectations of this component of the course by using only online resources. For most projects, use of printed material (archival or published) will satisfy this criterion, but other projects may require the use of field observation or material studies. You faculty advisor can guide you on appropriate resources to use.

You are, of course, encouraged to utilize online resources as appropriate, but as with secondary print literature, you should learn to distinguish between objective and scholarly material and material that is highly subjective and biased. This does not mean that such material cannot be used – a project on contemporary Islamophobia in the United States, for example, would necessarily need to utilize anti-Islamic material – but the researcher must be able to evaluate such material critically. Online encyclopedias (such as Wikipedia) are not appropriate for research. Other online material may or may not be appropriate depending on your topic, but in general, any of the following material is acceptable to use as an information resource:

• Academic journals published/available online
• Primary source documents
• Official websites of groups or organizations that you are researching

Structure

As you begin to form your research into a written draft, follow this template:

Introduction: Your introduction should offer a brief overview of your topic and include a clear statement of the thesis you wish to argue. While this thesis statement may need to be revised as you pursue your research, it should form the basis for the set of questions that you will bring to your resources.

Review of existing literature: A review of the existing scholarly literature on your topic is a necessary component in formulating and defending your thesis. What attention have scholars given to this subject? What methodologies have previously been employed? What remains to be done? (presumably, this would provide the rationale for your project). This review should conclude with the way in which your thesis will respond to the lack of information or understanding about your topic.

Methodology: You should indicate the methodology that you will employ in your effort to present and defend your thesis. Indeed, because there is no single methodology appropriate to the study of religion, you should give attention to the methodology that would best meet your needs early in your research, since your chosen methodological approach will impact the type of resource materials you will need. Utilizing a methodology appropriate to historical analysis, for example, will necessitate access to primary source documents; an ethnographic study may require either participant-observation or the use of questionnaires. Note that any research requiring you to obtain information from living subjects may require IRB approval. If you think that your approach may involve such research, you should discuss this with your faculty advisor.

Presentation and interpretation of research: Most of the content of your project will involve the presentation and interpretation of your research, and how this information offers the evidence necessary to support your thesis. Your project should demonstrate that you know how to use your resources critically and effectively to offer new information, a new perspective, or new insights about your topic – i.e., not just offer a summary of what others have written about it.

Conclusion: Your conclusion should offer a summary account of how the research that you have presented and interpreted has contributed to the support of your thesis, as well as how your thesis contributes to an understanding of the subject.

Citation and documentation

Your project must demonstrate your abilities to use and to cite information properly from different formats as appropriate to the academic study of religion. It must also illustrate your academic integrity through your respect of intellectual property, your ethical use of information, and your avoidance of plagiarism (see ILI Student Learning Outcomes #4 and #5).

Quotations from primary and secondary materials must be properly introduced (i.e., do not just “drop in” quotations or string them together). Quotations should either be 100% accurate or you must properly indicate where you made changes to fit your context better (i.e., ellipses for material eliminated; square brackets – not parentheses – for changes or additions to the text).

Of course, all quoted material – and any other specifically referenced materials – must be impeccably documented using the stylistic templates of the Chicago Manual of Style or Turabian’s Guide. You may use either footnotes or endnotes, but should must include a bibliography of all resources used. Ramsey Library offers a website for Citing Sources that has links to various online resources.

Specifications

• Eighteen to twenty pages of text, exclusive of title page, bibliography, images, etc.
• A properly formatted title page (posted online)
• Times-Roman 12 point font with 1” top/bottom margins, 1.25” side margins
• Documentation and bibliography according to the Chicago Manual of Style or Turabian

A schedule for submission of topics, bibliographic information, preliminary drafts, peer reviews, etc. will be established by the course instructor. Your ability to meet all due dates will be a component for your final course grade.

Oral presentation

As a part of the project, you must make a formal presentation of your topic and research in a public forum – such forums may be departmental, sponsored by an academic organization, or an undergraduate research symposium (local, regional, or national). To meet eligibility requirements as a University Research Scholar, you must present at a UNC Asheville Undergraduate Research symposium. This presentation fulfills the oral competency for the major; see below for further information.

Grading and assessment

Since this project fulfills a number of departmental student learning outcomes as well as ILI requirements, the departmental faculty have developed a number of grading and assessment rubrics. These are available at the Moodle site for RELS 490. Use these rubrics to supplement the guidelines.

Major competency: Competency in Religious Studies is fulfilled by the successful completion of a project as outlined in these guidelines with a grade of C or better. Consult the “Grading Rubric for Senior Research Project” for specific assessment criteria.

Oral competency: The oral competency is fulfilled by the successful oral presentation of your project in a public forum as indicated above. Although an integral component of the senior project, the presentation will be graded separately from the paper. Consult the “Assessment Rubric for Oral Competency” for specific assessment criteria.

Computer competency: The computer competency is fulfilled through locating, evaluating, and utilizing online databases and resources, through the production of a project that meets the specifications outlined in these guidelines, and through the use of computer technology (as appropriate) during your oral presentation. There is no separate grading rubric for this competency; competency will be evaluated using the appropriate components of the “Grading Rubric for Senior Research Project,” including all components marked as “Information Literacy Intensive” (ILI) and the “Assessment Rubric for Oral Competency” (“Technology”).

Your final grade for the course will be based upon your fulfillment of the criteria established in these guidelines and those set forth in the grading and assessment rubrics for major, oral, and computer competencies. In addition, your final course grade will be affected by your timely submission of all work, as well as any other requirements (e.g., participation) established by the course instructor. Note further that according to university policy, “As a condition of graduation, any academic deficiencies or weaknesses revealed by the demonstration of competency must be corrected to the satisfaction of the supervising faculty group”; thus, an IP grade may be awarded at the discretion of the instructor until such deficiencies or weaknesses in one or more of the competency areas have been corrected. Students cannot graduate with unresolved IP grades.