Assessment

Detailed description of the Assignments

You will have to complete Assignment I and either Assignment II Track A or Assignment II Track B. The submission dates for the assignments are same for all students.
The purpose of the first assessment is to test your skills of writing a research proposal and draft an instrument to collect data using a survey. The purpose of the second and the third assessment is to test your skills of data analysis at various stages – in the second assessment, we shall test your skills of reading a data set and performing initial cleaning of the data set and write a set of tables to conduct data analyses. In the third assessment, we shall test your skills of reading data sets, cleaning data sets, and using data in the data set to write a research article. All assessments must be:

First Assessment (50%, due: 23rd March, 2017)

In this first assignment, your task is to write a 1500-word research proposal on a chosen topic. Here are the tasks you will perform:
Please note the few restrictions for this assignment:
First of all, the topic you will choose must be a health related topic (any topic related to population or public health, environmental health, or any other aspect of health or healthcare will be acceptable for this assignment. Please do not choose biomedical laboratory based topics. Such topics are beyond the scope of this paper course.
Second, the research you will conduct to arrive at your solution must be quantitative; therefore, please do not choose a research topic or research process for which you will propose to conduct qualitative research – qualitative research is beyond the scope of this course.
Third, you will need to describe in details the type of study you will conduct, your participants in the study, how you will recruit them, what you will measure and how you will measure, your key hypotheses, and your plans of data analyses. In this assignment, you will have to write about your sample size and power for your study, but beyond that, we do not require you to do any data analyses as such.
Finally, in your research proposal, you will not have to write about budget or timeline. We do not need that information. Please stick to the sections outlined below and stick to the word limit.
You will need to write about 1500 words - this means you can write fewer words but not more than 2000 words. Two thousand words will be roughly four pages in double spaced typed pages. The word count excludes words contained in the tables, figures, and references. All words included in the title, sections and paragraphs will be included towards your word count. The word count also excludes words in your survey instrument if you want to include your survey instrument in the research proposal.
The Assignment must be submitted as PDF at Learn by the due date (that is, 23rd March, 2017). The Learn submission site will open on the 16th of March for submission and close on the 23rd of March. No other form of submission will be allowed. Your assignment must consist of the following sections: title, your student ID next to your title, goals and objectives of the research, background information detailing in at least three paragraphs what is the current state of knowledge of the key problem you want to address, what is missing or not known about the key problem that you are proposing to work on, and what you will do about it, and details of the methods. All facts that you will state in your document must be backed up by attribution to a source such as a URL or hyperlink (you must state the full URL of the hyperlink clearly on your document), or in the form of a citation. You must follow the library website for how to insert citations and references in your document. For more information, see the following page,
http://www.library.canterbury.ac.nz/services/ref/apa/.

Second Assessment Track A (optional), 50%, due: 27th April, 2017

The purpose of this assessment is to demonstrate how well you have learned the principles of data preprocessing and simple analyses. In this assignment, you will need to:
The length of this Assignment should not exceed 1500 words, excluding words contained in tables, figures, and references. You must submit a PDF document through Learn by the due date, that is, 27th April, 2017. As in the first assignment, you will need to state source of all your facts, and you will need to include the following sections in your report:

Second Assessment, Track B (Optional), 50%, due date: 1st June, 2017

The purpose of this assignment will be to demonstrate that you can read data sets, read and interpret relevant health research, critique them, and on the basis of your data analysis, you can write a report to summarise your interpretations of health data. In this assignment you will:
The length of the Assignment must not exceed 2000 words. The report must have the following sections:
Title. – The title must be express the theme of the report. Think of your title as a very tiny summary of the paper. Write your Student ID in the line next to the or below the title
Abstract. – A 100 word limit abstract that will contain the key messages in the paper.
Introduction. – Write in three subsections. Write the nature of the problem that you have addressed in this paper in the first subsection, what is not known or how a data set like the one you have used can address the problem in the second subsection, and a summary of how you have addressed that knowledge gap using this data set in the third subsection
Methods. – In this section, write where did you get the data. Describe and paraphrase the research that was done to generate the data on which you worked, and steps you took to create the tables and graphs that you have created in this paper.
Findings. – In this section, write or paraphrase the tables and the figures that you have created and their key messages. Be careful not to repeat the information that are already presented in the tables but just point to them.
Discussion. – In this section, summarise the key findings in the findings section as the first paragraph, and then in the subsequent sections, describe the important of these findings and significance of the findings.
The length of this assignment document is 2000 words or less. This word count excludes words contained in the tables (caption and body of the table), figures (captions), appendix (supporting data that you will present), references (all words in the references). Otherwise, all words in the section headings, and paragraphs will be counted. Submit just one PDF document in Learn by the specified date. The Learn submission box will be open from 24th May till 1st June for submission. You will not have to write a cover sheet, and do not submit in any other format. Do not submit a hard copy.