How to Defend a Research Project

HOW TO DEFEND A RESEARCH PROJECT

It has being discovered that  lots of tertiary education students find it very difficult to defend their research project in ten minutes, simply because they don’t know the procedures for a project defense. Here are some procedures and a sample of a research project defense for easy assimilation.

PROCEDURES FOR A RESEARCH PROJECT DEFENSE
 First, acknowledge everyone present.
 Introduce yourself.
 State the title of your project.
 State what prompted your study.
 List the research questions
 Mention your research hypothesis
 State your theoretical/conceptual      framework
 State the gap your research project is trying to fill.
 Then state your research procedures
 Discuss your findings, conclusion and recommendations.

 SAMPLE OF A RESEARCH PROJECT DEFENSE
The dean of Faculty of Education, the HOD of Educational Administration and Policy Studies, all professors here present, lecturers and my fellow students, good day.
I am Dinzei Maureen  and my desertion topic is Staff Development Needs of Principals in Delta state Public and Private Secondary Schools.
What prompted this study is the fact that over the years, staff has been discovered to neglect most of their duties. They now go late to school, laziness to write lesson notes, inability to finish up their scheme of work for the term, l
inability to discipline students and abuse of office.
These inadequacies by staff occur due to the fact that principals lack some staff development skills which include communication, instructional supervision, ICT development and discipline.
Four research questions and four research hypotheses were used for this study. The descriptive survey design was used for this study. The population of this study comprised all public and private secondary schools in the 3 senatorial districts. This amounted to 1072. The sample size  for this study is 525 using the stratified random sampling technique. This was derived by taking 50% of the total number of all the public secondary school principals and 50% of all the private secondary school principals in Delta state.
A questionnaire titled" Staff Development Needs Of Principals in Delta State Public and Private Secondary Schools was used for this study.
The reliability of the instrument was done using the Cronbalch Alpha. The reliability coefficient of 0.7 was derived and it was fit to carry out the data obtained.
The research questions were analyzed using mean and standard deviation while the independent sample t- test was used to analyze the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance.
The result revealed that there is no significant difference between private and public secondary school principals on their communication needs, that there is no significant difference between male and female principals on their instructional supervisory needs, that there is no significant difference between principals' academic qualification and their ICT development skill needs and that there is no significant difference between principals'  years of teaching experience and their students' disciplinary skills.

The study recommended that seminars, workshop and conferences should be organized more often in order to train and retrain secondary school principals on the skills needed to carry out their duties effectively irrespective of their sex, age, academic qualification and years of teaching experience.

THANK YOU!!