Overview
The purpose of the project is for students to demonstrate their ability to independently address an environmental issue and/or sustainability problem, as well as to produce a final product that communicates the science effectively. By now, you should have picked up a topic and submitted a proposal. Final Individual Project Proposal was essentially created to achieve that goal. For the completion of final project and to turn your proposal into a full paper/project, you will continue to dive deeper into the chosen topic. You will continue to learn more about the chosen topic of interest by reading various reliable sources that could include your textbook, peer reviewed journal articles, class lectures and other reliable sources. You can use Wikipedia initially to learn more about your topic but further down the line when you know more about your topic, you may realize that it might not be a reliable source to cite for your project. The idea is to build upon the knowledge learned in the respective lectures, presentations, discussions. The proposal that you have submitted serves as a foundation and you need to build up on that and complete the final project by the end of the semester. You can consider the Final individual project as the review of an environmental issue of concern and you will continue to become increasingly more familiar with it by researching more about the a) background, b)problems associated with the environmental issue of concern and c) improvements and recommendations to ameliorate the situation.
Grading scheme: The project will be graded using the following criteria:
- page 1 / Title Page (5 points)
- Your Name(s)
- Project Title
- Body: a few pages (100 points)
- environmental issue you are addressing (introduction and background) Why is it important? (500-700 words) 20 points
- Current status /what problems are being caused due to the environmental issue of concern (600-800 words) 20 points
- What is currently being done to address the issue ? (600-800 words) 20 points
- recommendations/ what you think should be done to address the issue of concern (300-500 words) 20 points
- Depth of Research - Turnitin similarity score is not more than 20%. Multiple sources and articles were reviewed to get a good understanding of the topic and reasonable solutions were mentioned and/or suggested. 20 points
- Must use in-text citations in APA format
- In the main body of the text, include the authors and year of publication of articles or books you used. For example, “Sea level rise will negatively impact Florida’s coastal water resources (Jones, 1999).” If this is two authors use (Jones and Smith, 1999). More than two, use (Jones et al. 1999). NB: the reference goes within the sentence, i.e. the point goes AFTER the brackets, not BEFORE! If you quote someone, it should be in with “…” and be referenced (Jones, 1999, pg. 15). I expect to see quotes used no more than three times.
- You can use figures and tables but they do not count towards word limit and should be properly cited.
- Body of the write-up does not necessarily need to follow APA format.
- last page/References (20 points)
- Start on new page after end of the body of the proposal
- APA format
- Include at least 6 references and they should be cited in the body of the paper. At least 2 of the references should be from peer reviewed journal articles.
- For the reference list at the last page of the paper it should be alphabetical, and have the following structure: author(s), year of publication, title of articles, journal name, volume and issue in which it was published and finally the pages. For example: Jones, P. 1999. Sea level rise in Florida. Water Resources vol. 10, 5-16.