How it works

Every check is a rule, not an opinion. Each one comes from somewhere you can go and read.

What it checks

Your topic

Whether the thing you are asking about can be measured at all — “importance of” and “role of” cannot.
Whether you can reach the population you named. A national sample is not collectable by one student.
Whether “Effect of” is honest. You cannot run an experiment on gender, age or school type.
Whether the title fits your handbook’s word limit.

Your objectives, questions and hypotheses

Whether each objective has a research question that can actually answer it.
Whether the question asks what the objective sets out to find — a level cannot show influence.
Whether a hypothesis is licensed at all. A descriptive objective has nothing to test.
Whether your statistical test can answer the objective. A t-test cannot show a relationship.

What it refuses to do

It will not write your project, and there is no setting that changes that. No button produces a chapter, a paragraph of your argument, or a finished sentence about your study. You type first, always; the system responds to what you wrote. That is not a restriction bolted on — it is the whole design, and it is what makes the output something you can defend in a viva.

What the guidance is grounded in

Three layers, in order of authority — and they are not equally solid, so we say which is which.

1. The national curriculum

NUC’s Core Curriculum and Minimum Academic Standards for Education (2023). EDU 400 requires you to identify researchable project topics and to determine statistical tools for analysing data based on research objectives — which is exactly the objective-to-test check. Postgraduate study is governed by PG BMAS (2011), which sets credit units and examination rules but prescribes no chapter structure at all.

2. Your institution’s handbook

Because NUC prescribes no structure, your handbook is the only authority on the thing you are actually marked on — and handbooks disagree. Chapter counts run from five to eight; title limits from 22 words to 25. See what we hold for your institution.

3. The research methods literature

Where a rule comes from a text, the check names it. That each specific objective needs its own research question is stated by Idris et al. (2024) and by Cohen, Manion & Morrison, who describe research questions as taking “the purposes and objectives of the research” and narrowing them into specific questions. That objectives sort by action — describe, compare, relate — is Creswell (2015). Sample-size formulas cite Krejcie & Morgan (1970), Yamane (1967) and Cochran (1977); reliability cites Cronbach (1951) and Nunnally (1978).

Those five are the ones your department will ask for by name, and a 1970 table is not wrong because it is from 1970. But citing only them makes a proposal look as though you have read nobody since 1978, and current practice is to justify a sample by power analysis rather than by reading a number off a table. So the clinic names both. For sample size it adds Bartlett, Kotrlik & Higgins (2001), which turns Cochran’s formulas into usable tables and is the natural bridge to modern work, and Faul, Erdfelder, Lang & Buchner (2007) with Faul, Erdfelder, Buchner & Lang (2009) for G*Power. For reliability it adds Nunnally & Bernstein (1994), the third edition, and Tavakol & Dennick (2011) — three pages, and the clearest short account of what alpha does not tell you.

Note the two G*Power papers: the author order changes between them. It is Lang & Buchner in 2007 and Buchner & Lang in 2009. Reference lists get this wrong constantly, including lists produced by AI tools.

And where a rule is only convention, the check says so. Some of what Nigerian departments enforce — the exact one-to-one count of objectives, questions and hypotheses, for instance — is not written down in any methodology text we could find. Those checks read “your department will expect”, not “this is wrong”. You are owed that difference.

One thing worth knowing: Creswell advises writing either research questions or hypotheses, not both, and Nigerian courseware agrees. Most Nigerian departments expect both. Follow your department — but the pair is a local convention, not a requirement of the literature.

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