Graduate Certificate Program
Integrated Projects II/ Field Work II
Phase IV - Focused Investigation
& Marking Rubric

The students will continue brainstorming sessions as a team during class time or using virtual office .When possible students could conduct on site visits ( company they research ).
Conduct individual investigation outside of class time in order to finalize recommendations, potentially using some of the following methods of research. Each week the investigative research is reviewed and discussed in order to clarify findings .
graded by the professor according to the rubric on the next page.
Types and Examples of Investigation
i) Critical Theory Research: Topic “Nicholbys’’ gift shop
Nicholby’s (nicholbys.com)
• What age group of people shops at Nicholbys or similar kind of store?
• The social media that the group is using?
• Nicholby’s what target market which media the reach the approx increase in revenue based on research and investment required?
• In order to support the hypothesis and to create an argument the team might decide to review and utilize:
- theory
- cases
- examples
- statistics
- from peer-reviewed journal articles, business textbooks, consulting company industry reports, industry data (government or private), academic disciplines pertinent to the problem at hand such as psychology, sociology, etc.
Evaluation – Marking Rubric
Focused Investigation Assignment – 15%
Total Marks 30
Components:
Research
1) Is the team taking initiative to use various methods of investigation to continue their analysis? (3)
2) Is the team continuing to brainstorm and create potential solutions for their client? (2)
3) Is the team taking into considerations ideas provided by other teams in regards their project? (2)
4) Is the team using informal sources (magazine articles, Wikipedia, blogs, etc.) to generate ideas or to find companies with similar business cases? (3)
5) Is the team using formal sources (client, peer-reviewed articles, Passport, Mintel, SKIFT, STR, etc.) to obtain useful data or business cases of similar situations in other companies? (2)
6) Is the team using data to support their conclusions? (2)
7) peer-reviewed articles (2)
8) Is the team beginning to consider information they will need in regards determining costs, benefits and feasibility for each recommendation? (2)
Documentation
9) Is the investigation for each solution documented? (2)
10) Does the team take notes during feedback sessions? (2)
11) Who does what ( 2)
Individual Group Members Contribution
12) Is each member of the group providing a weekly update as to their investigation tasks and completion status? (2)
13) Is each member of the group contributing to the investigation and doing her fair share of the work? (2)
14) Is each member aware of the whole demarche of the project and the current status of each members contribution? (2)
Rating Scale
Never Mostly Always
0 1 2