Grant Paper

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Length of Grant Paper: 10-12 pages, double-spaced, with 1 inch margins on all four sides (this page limit does not include references). Please email the paper to me when finished.

If you'd like to see an example of what a grant looks like, click here. Please keep in mind, however, that the example can only be used to give you a general idea of what your paper might look like and that the specifics of your grant are likely to be quite different.

The Grant Paper should consist of the following sections.

  • Specific Aims

    • This is a short (no more than half a page) summary of your project that includes all the elements of your proposal. In other words, it states the question that you will be addressing, the significance of it for the field, the methods that you will use to investigate it, and what you expect to find and what it will mean. Usually, this section is written last. In other words, write the rest of your proposal first and then you'll find it much easier to put this section together. A good Specific Aims section is hard to write because you are trying to communicate all the elements of your proposal in a short, concise, and comprehensible manner! Thus, you should write it and then revise it several times until you get it "right".

  • Background & Significance section (in an NIH grant application this section is followed by a Preliminary Studies section but you do not need to worry about it)

    • Here, you will review the literature (drawn from primary journal articles; not textbooks) that is pertinent to the question that you will be investigating and point out what we still do not know. In other words, you have to demonstrate that even though we might know a good bit about a particular issue, there are still "holes" in our knowledge and your grant is designed to fill one of these holes by providing relevant data. When reviewing the literature, you MUST describe the studies and their results in your own words, NOT by copying parts of journal abstracts or text from the actual articles.

  • Research Design & Methods

    • In this section, you will provide details regarding:

      • the participants that you will be testing (with a justification of the specific ages and types of participants that you have chosen)

      • the general experimental methods that you plan to use (e.g., observational methods that might utilize analysis of videotapes, habituation/test procedures if you plan to study learning and discrimination, reaching behaviors, psychophysiological methods like ERPs or EEGs, etc......)

      • the specific experiments that you plan to run (I suggest that you propose at least 3 different experiments to address 3 specific questions raised by your general question that you raised in your Background & Significance section)

      • analysis, prediction, & interpretation - here you will outline the kinds of statistical analyses that you will conduct, what you expect to find, and how you will interpret your findings in relation to your stated goals in your specific aims

       

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This site was last updated 11/29/05