An Evaluation of How Students Learn to Write Research Proposals: A Case Study of the Master of Education Students in the Faculty of Education, University of Zimbabwe

Abstract

Writing a research proposal is a crucial step in doing a research project. The quality of the project in most cases is determined by the proposal. One of the limitations of research in education is the scarcity of relevant material that serves as guides for researchers. Available material, though sometimes helpful, tend to bring every researcher outside their territory because of the wrong assumptions made of their unique environments. Eight students studying for a Master’s degree in the Faculty of Education at the University of Zimbabwe were studied after a lengthy period of tuition in research methods in order to find out how they fared in proposal writing. The results, after three months of observation, revealed that most of them struggled to put a decent proposal together.  This makes proposal writing a rather daunting task for the inexperienced researcher. This paper, therefore, attempts to overcome such limitations.