PROGRESS REPORT

Assessment will be based on the quality of three progress reports submitted to supervisors.

You must contact and communicate with your supervisor regularly (email/skype/telephone/etc). If you fail to take responsibility and communicate with your Supervisor for more than four (4) weeks without prior arrangement, you may be asked to show cause why a grade of FAIL should not be given.

Progress reports should be submitted on-line in Moodle. Dates for submission of progress reports are specified in the study schedule. The Supervisor will assess your report based on your achievement in project, the quality of the reports and adherence to the schedule. Each progress report should present important issues and problems you faced, major decisions made, your progress over the past period and planned activities for the following period.

Before any laboratory or workshop activities (if applicable) commence, or before any materials are brought to the University for construction or testing purposes, students are required to prepare project work plans and conduct risk assessments in line with the University policy documents. Failure to comply with this requirement will result in a FAIL.

DRAFT REPORT

In Week 9, you must provide your Supervisor with a draft version of your report for feedback. It should be submitted on-line into Moodle. You will not be able to submit your final report unless you have addressed supervisor's feedback into your final report.

REPORT LAYOUT

Title page

Title

School name

Student name and student number

Supervisor’s name

Unit code and name The Term and Year of unit enrollment.

Executive summary

No more than two pages giving an overview of the project objectives, thesis content and results.

Acknowledgements (if any)

Table of contents

List of figures

List of tables

Nomenclature (if any)

Introduction

Background into the project including the rationale supporting the need to undertake it and defining the objectives and scopes of the study.

Literature review

A literature review is an account of IMPORTANT information has been published on topics related to your project by recognised scholars, workers and researchers. Quality is more important than quantity. You should identify the important sources of information, and explain why you place your confidence in them. It is part of the introduction to your report. In writing the literature review, your purpose is to convey to your reader what knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic, and what you perceive to be their strengths and weaknesses. As a piece of writing, the literature review must be defined by your project objective. It is not just a descriptive list of the material available or a set of summaries of any published articles. Besides enlarging your knowledge about the topic, writing a literature review lets you gain and demonstrate skills in two areas, namely information seeking and critical appraisal.

Information seeking: the ability to scan the literature efficiently, using manual or computerised methods, to identify a set of useful articles and books

Critical appraisal: the ability to apply principles of analysis to identify unbiased and valid studies.

A literature review should be organised around and related directly to the project you are developing, it should synthesize results into a summary of what is and is not known, identify areas of controversy in the literature, and it should identify or recommend a best method of approach to solving the project objective.

Methodology

A detailed description of the work that you have performed.

Results and Discussion

This section is most important for your report. You need to clearly discuss and explain results obtained with their correct interpretation, and graphs and tables.

Conclusions and Recommendations

Findings and outcomes of the implementation work, and some recommendations for further study should be provided here.

References