General Description of the Assignment (from the syllabus)
Research Briefing Paper (Synthesis category = 20% of Course Grade) – The purpose of this
assignment is to strengthen your research skills, enhance your presentation skills, and expand
your knowledge. You will need to research material beyond the class readings to investigate
labor/employee relations at a specific organization. You will report your findings to the class in
a briefing paper (5 or 6 double-spaced pages, not including the title page and reference list).
You’ll need between 15-20 sources. Scholarly sources from academic libraries should dominate
your research. Wikipedia is not an acceptable source. Of course, you may use online libraries,
such as the one at UMGC. Given much of the information available via the web is not screened
for accuracy, you should be careful in selecting information from this source. In other words,
website information should be used appropriately (i.e., to describe a specific company’s
program or report a governmental policy). APA should be used to reference your sources.
Additional instructions will be provided. (Course Objectives 1, 2, 3, 4, 6)
Note: Graduate School courses require about 25 sources for a standard term paper. The 15-20
sources needed here are part of the overall research requirement. Instead of writing an 18-25
page paper, however, this assignment reduces the requirement to 5-6 double-spaced pages of
an executive briefing. This way you meet the research requirements but have a smaller writing
task. Being concise and knowing which information to include, however, can be challenging; so,
allow yourself enough time to craft a suitable product. Good presentations of any nature have
much more research to support the amount of material that is presented, so this is a good skill
