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536 Writing Recommendation Reports

The executive summary
describes the project with a
focus on the managerial aspects,
particularly the recommendation. 1
Note the writers’ emphasis on executive Summary
the problem at CMSU.
On September 6, 2011, Dr. Jill Bremerton, Vice President for Student Affairs at
Here the writers present a brief Central Montana State University (CMSU), formally invited the CMSU Student
statement of the subject of their Affairs Advisory Committee (SAAC) to participate in a feasibility study about the
report. use of student response systems, commonly called clickers, at CMSU.
The background of the feasibil- Currently, CMSU has only a few sets of clickers that instructors can check out for
ity study that Dr. Bremerton is occasional use in their large lecture courses. Because of an increasing consensus in
funding. the scholarly community that clickers improve the classroom learning environment
and can improve learning in large lecture courses, Dr. Bremerton has allocated
resources for a large feasibility study of whether CMSU should select a particular
clicker system for use on campus. The research that Dr. Bremerton asked SAAC to
perform will be part of this large feasibility study.
A statement of the assignment Dr. Bremerton invited us to perform research that would assess instructor and
that Dr. Bremerton gave the student attitudes toward clickers and determine whether the current infrastructure
writers. This statement helps the of the large lecture halls on campus would affect whether and how the university
reader remember the context should pursue its feasibility study. She further asked us to present our findings and
for the report she is reading. recommendations.
Don’t assume that your readers
remember what they asked you To perform this research, we familiarized ourselves with the basics of clicker use in
to do weeks or months earlier. postsecondary schools. Then, we devised interview questions and questionnaires to
distribute to appropriate CMSU stakeholders.
A brief statement of the meth-
ods the writers used to carry We found that instructors will likely be very receptive to this feasibility study. In
out their research. Throughout addition, if CMSU adopts a formal policy of clicker use, faculty will be positive
this report, the writers use the about it — provided the university chooses a good clicker system and provides ef-
active voice (“We familiarized fective technical support. Further, we found that more than half (56 percent) of the
ourselves . . .”). See Ch. 10, CMSU students who responded to our questionnaire expressed a willingness to pay
p. 241, for more on the active up to $40 for a clicker. A quarter (23 percent) are willing to pay only $20, but a fifth
voice. Note, too, that the discus- (19 percent) are willing to pay up to $60. The infrastructure of our 17 large lecture
sion of the methods is brief: halls presents no special difficulties for clicker use, provided that we restrict our
most executive readers are not study to radiofrequency-based systems, which is becoming the standard technology
very interested in the details of for clickers. Further, we found that the existing computer systems in the lecture
the methods you used. halls include both Macs and PCs with operating systems back to Windows XP.
Findings are the important On the basis of these conclusions, we recommend that CMSU proceed with its
results and conclusions of a feasibility study of the costs and benefits of adopting a clicker policy on campus.
study. Here, the writers devote
a few sentences to the findings
related to instructor and student
attitudes and a few sentences
to the findings related to the
infrastructure.
The writers use the word recom-
mend. Using key generic terms
such as problem, methods,
results, conclusions, and
recommendations helps readers
understand the role that each
section plays in the document.

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