Clean Up the References. There Are Comments

¶ … clean up the references. There are comments in them that should not be there. On the reference to "Knight Foundation," there is a comment that this should not be used as a source. That's true, but the entire sentence is redundant so you may as well remove that. On the ideas in the problem statement, the study itself is not entirely clear.

While the basic premise that there barriers to mentorship for women and minorities has almost certainly been studied in academic research, the problem statement does not suggest a particular thread for the paper. The framing of the problem as "look at the plight of such groups" is not action-oriented. Does this mean you are going to read a book about it? What are you specifically going to study -- propose a research question that will allow you to answer a single, specific question.

On the significance, what you have is a good start. You should go beyond this, however, and I suspect when you get a more specific research question you will be able to go beyond this. Right now, you are saying the same thing three ways. What I mean is that you feel the research is significant because this is something that needs to be talked about. That's only sort of true.

For your research to be genuinely significant, you will be able to add knowledge that we do not already have. So the research should get into more detail about something, or ask a new question, or look at the issue from a different perspective. The research will be significant if it adds something new to the existing body of scholarship on this issue. On the research questions, only use the second one. The first one is too vague, and doesn't add anything new.

Basically that first question will be answered and outlined in your literature review. The second question is where you are getting to something good. It is important to know what the current outcomes are of mentoring. If we know where we are today, then we can chart a course for the future. So the second question is great, because it gives us information that can be used to make improvements to the state of mentoring among African-American males.

I would focus entirely on the second question, and address the first one in your lit review. On the nature of the study, I'm not sure this is going to be a quasi-experimental design. Quasi-experimental is basically experimental but without the same controls. You are not going to be running mentoring scenarios or anything like that I presume, because mentoring is something with benefits that can take years to really manifest. But you are going to, presumably, compare the outcomes for African-American males who have had mentors vs.

The outcomes for those who have not. Focus on the second question: "how effective has mentoring been in developing strong Africa-American male leaders?" You have two choices of how to approach this: You can do a meta-analysis that gathers together multiple studies to see if specific trends emerge, or you can use surveys.