Why this scientific question is interesting and important. With respect to the last item, you should state the scientific findings that have led up to your idea, that is, the background to your idea.

You are going to write a grant application for a small amount of money (say, $20,000) to do an experiment on some aspect of animal cognition. Your grant proposal should be 5 pages and also the works cited page, double spaced, with 1 inch margins. To convince the review panel, you will need to tell them:

What the hypothesis is
Briefly, what method you will use to test it
Why this scientific question is interesting and important.
With respect to the last item, you should state the scientific findings that have led up to your idea, that is, the background to your idea. Any statement of fact should have a scientific citation linked to it in this class, we do not state unsubstantiated facts. Therefore, you should have read at least 5 references relevant to your topic. At the end of your paper, have a literature cited section, with both an MLA formatted citation AND an html link to the paper.
Grant applications will be graded according to:

Uniqueness:

The hypothesis should be UNIQUE. That is, grant applications for research projects that have already been done (and written up in the scientific literature) will NOT be funded. You need to do a full search of the literature to ensure that this has not been done. If it has been done, but in other species, then you need to justify why the experiment should be done in the species you are proposing (i.e., motivate your proposal).

Motivation:

Here I dont mean your personal motivation. Instead I want you to motivate your research question. You have to give your grant reviewers enough background to understand why your hypothesis is interesting, even if they arent familiar with the field. For example, it wouldnt be very interesting for people to explore why mantis shrimps have 12 cones if they didnt already know that every other animal in the kingdom known to have color vision has four or fewer cones. Otherwise, its like, so what? You will therefore have to have a good grasp on the existing literature so that you can communicate it to your readers. Luckily, you will already have mined this literature in fulfilment of the uniqueness criteria. Your idea didnt come out of nowhere it built on previous findings, and led you to a why or a what if? Typically this motivation aspect is accomplished in the introduction of a paper, so if you need inspiration, take a look at your favorite research papers intro.

Clarity of hypothesis Clearly and explicitly state your hypothesis and your null hypothesis.

Clarity of methods We should know exactly what you want to do and why. We dont need minute details (brand names of equipment, etc), but we need to know how you intend to run the experiment AND what sort of analysis you plan on doing (ie, what comparisons are you going to make, what will be your dependent variables, etc)?

Readability Edit your draft before you turn it in for spelling and grammar errors. Make sure your paper is organized well and makes sense.

Feasibility Is this experiment doable? Reviewers arent going to give you money if the experiment is unlikely to yield a result. Think critically about your design.

Citations –

If you are uncertain about formatting references, look at a scientific review or paper and use it as an example. Every journal is a little different, with different requirements for references, but they all have something in common: In-text citations (either by last name and date, or number) that can be matched uniquely to the full citation in the list at the end of the paper. EVERY FACTUAL STATEMENT should have a scientific reference. Popular sources, such as websites, personal communications, laypersons news sources or magazines, etc., are only allowable in very, very specific circumstances. Typically you should only cite peer-reviewed sources.

I don’t have examples of this exact experiment, but I do have examples of something similar (albeit shorter) in files uploaded.

TOPIC/IDEAS YOU CAN CHOOSE FROM TO BASE THIS ESSAY.
(IN ANIMAL COGNITION) pick one or two.
Social behavior- pair bonding, aggression, helping behavior, social contagion
Fight/flight
Perception
Memory- long term memory, working memory, episodic memory
Numerosity- logic, rule learning
Pattern recognition
Problem solving- tool use, planning

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