I hear, and I forget;
I see, and I remember;
I do, and I understand
-Chinese Proverb

In order to both enhance and showcase the skills learned throughout the semester, each of you will be engaged in a practical research project during the second half of the semester. For these assignments, you will be assigned to one of several groups, each of which is acting as a team of management consultants for the Hickok Center for Brain Injury.
The purpose of the exercise is to give you the opportunity to wrestle with the challenges of devising a realistic piece of research and recommendations for a real organization.

In particular, each group will make a presentation on their findings of "benchmarking" and "best practices" research for the Hickok Center. I have created a set of resources on the course web site designed to help you in your efforts to benchmark the Hickok Center's performance and search for best practices via the web.

Among your choices for benchmarking / best practices areas are the following:

• Performance measurement system
• Analysis of social entrepreneurial ventures
• Satisfaction surveys
• Volunteer recruitment and retention plan

By the 11/2 class session, each group should come to a provisional "workload agreement" and share this information with me. I will help point you in the right direction for some of the most relevant resources. I will also provide you with hints about how to focus your research. I will also provide feedback on your ideas as you develop them week by week. Further feedback can be provided to your group in class on November 9th and November 30th. In the end, your recommendations should be realistic and appropriate for an organization like the Hickok Center.

On the 7th of December, each group will make a presentation of their recommendations to the rest of the class. Each presentation should be approximately 15-20 minutes, and should include the use of Power Point or an alternative visual presentation tool; you should also provide a small number of hand-outs to the class. In your presentation, be sure also to tell us how you found the relevant information.

As noted in the course syllabus, the Group Presentation and Report comprises 25% of your final course grade. 15% of your grade will be derived from each student's reflective analysis, and 10% will be derived from the group presentation.