Background

The Nature of the Problem. Some years ago, when I had the privilege of serving as a program director at the National Science Foundation, the proposals I read left me with a distinct impression: many researchers presented exciting research ideas, but in a high proportion of cases the exciting ideas were embedded in horrendously constructed proposals. In relatively few cases were the proposals well constructed, with important elements missing or underdeveloped. One would often find, for example, after a clear initial statement of the research problem and an effectively executed literature review, a thin or nonexistent research design or, without transition, a statement of the statistics to be used. Hypotheses, where present, were often not derived from the discussed literature, or from any literature.