This course is to give students an opportunity to do a research into their major, which helps improve their research skills on collecting and presenting data, as well as enhance students’ critical thinking on analyzing and recommending solutions to a problem in question.

Students are supposed to select their interested research topic from a suggested topic list, work in groups of four or five members under supervision of an advisory lecturer, taking initiative in planning, allocating workload, arranging schedule, handling and reporting collected data, as well as analyzing, and thinking out solutions to, the selected question so as to write a report of about 7,000 – 8,000 words. Students are also instructed to become acquainted with qualitative or/and quantitative methods at a simple level.

This course highly emphasizes on students’ autonomy and independence in thinking and performing own work. Advisory lecturers merely play the role of a facilitator and will not impose his/her opinion on students’ thoughts or solutions.

This project is to enable students to do desk research (secondary research) and finally write a report of about 6,000 words on a chosen topic. It trains students how to conduct secondary research from planning, organizing tasks, sorting out and analyzing the information collected. To fulfill the project, students are not only able to identify, describe, explain or restate the information they obtain from many different sources such as books, periodicals, newspapers, library database and some websites but also to process those kinds of information in order to reach a conclusion or response(s) to a research question and basically use MS-Word to write the report. More importantly, they have an opportunity to learn to work in teams.