After coding your data and selecting your 2-3 issues for analysis, you will plan and draft your Contextual Analysis Report. Your research report will provide you an opportunity to reflect upon the ways in which these issues shape standards in your field and will highlight the ways in which you became more aware of certain issues during your own research.

plan

Your plan will provide you with a general outline for your report. Drawing upon specific examples from your data, your plan should describe, analyze, and interrelate your selected issues. Using your completed data coding grid, determine which examples will be most useful in the drafting of your report. Your description and analysis of these examples will illustrate the ways in which your selected issues affect standards and relationships within your professional context.

Remember to use the downloadable Word form to complete your plan.

After completing your contextual analysis plan, you will give and receive detailed feedback during an in-class peer response session. Based upon the peer feedback on your plan, you then will draft your report.

Remember to use the downloadable Word form to complete your peer response.

report

After completing your data coding and plan, use the following guidelines to structure your report.

For an example of the report, please select this downloadable link to a former student's paper. Please be advised this report explores 4 issues and it describes and relates examples from textual analysis field work--neither of which is applicable to your required version. If you have questions, please contact me.


form & formatting

Your 4 page Contextual Analysis Report should follow the general form and formatting guidelines provided below:

Descriptively titled headings for each section of the report.

Single-spaced excepted between sections.

full block.

1-inch margins.

Page numbers.

Body text in 12-point serif font.

Headings in a sans-serif font larger than that of the body text.

Appropriate use of borders.

Appropriate white space.

Consistent use of fonts, spacing, borders, etc.

content

Though the content of your report will be particular to your professional context research, use the following general sections as guides for drafting your report.

title page

Your title page, which does not count toward the page limit for the report, should include a descriptive title for your report, your name, and the date on which the report will be submitted for evaluation.

introduction

Your descriptively titled introduction should be a 1-2-paragraph synopsis of the report. You, however, should integrate into this synopsis brief description of your professional context, your position and investment within the context, and your data sources (whom you interviewed, the documents you collected, and the site you observed).

body of report

The body of your report should be written in paragraph form and constitute the bulk of your report. The body also should be organized around the issues for analysis that you identified in your plan. Your critical discussion of how particular relationships are important to your position within your professional writing context should be divided into 2-3 descriptively titled sections that correlate with your issues for analysis.

Each well-developed section should highlight an issue for analysis. Thus, each section of the body of the report should describe a highlighted issue including significant details from your transcripts and analyze the issue's significance to your professional context.

synthesis of analysis

Your concluding section must not be a mere summary of what you have already discussed in the report. Instead, your synthesis should make critical connections among your issues for analysis in terms of their significance to your professional context and your position within it.

deadlines

Consult the calendar for contextual analysis scheduling and deadlines.