Exercises — Chapter 6: The Specific Aims Page

Part C is the book's most important checkpoint: drafting your own aims page. Selected answers in the appendix.

Part A — Recall and Understand

6.1. State the threshold concept in one sentence. Why does the aims page carry so much more weight than any other page?

6.2. List the six moves of a specific aims page in order, and the reviewer question each answers.

6.3. Distinguish a long-term goal from an overall objective, and a hypothesis from a topic.

6.4. What are the three properties of a strong aim? Define the dependency trap.

6.5. List five mistakes that kill aims pages.

6.6. How does the aims page translate into an executive summary's components?

Part B — Apply

6.7. Fix the hook. Rewrite this generic hook to be specific, mission-relevant, and tension-bearing (invent plausible specifics): "Mental health is an important issue affecting many young people, and more support is needed."

6.8. Spot the dependency. For each pair, say whether the aims are dependent, and fix any that are: (a) "Aim 1: Show drug X reduces tumor size. Aim 2: Determine X's mechanism of action." (b) "Aim 1: Measure adherence under the intervention. Aim 2: Measure glycemic control under the intervention."

6.9. Strengthen weak aims. Rewrite each to be testable and concrete: (a) "Explore the role of social support in recovery." (b) "Investigate our new curriculum." (c) "Look at outcomes for participants."

6.10. Count and cut. An aims page has six aims, including "Aim 6: Publish and present the findings." How many aims should it likely have, and what's wrong with Aim 6?

6.11. Diagnose a page. Read the weak version of Hernandez's page (Section 6.3). List every flaw you can find and the fix for each.

Part C — Analyze and Create (your real project)

6.12. Draft your aims page. Using the Section 6.2 skeleton, write a complete one-page specific aims page for your project (or an executive summary if your funder requires one): hook, gap, long-term goal + objective, central hypothesis (or central question), 2–4 independent aims, and a payoff paragraph.

6.13. Dependency check. For each of your aims, answer: "if the prior aim gives a disappointing result, is this aim still worth doing?" Fix any "no."

6.14. Scope-test each aim. Apply the three-question scope test (significant? feasible? independent?) to each of your aims.

6.15. Non-expert test. Give your aims page to someone outside your field and have them tell you back what you'll do and why it matters. Note where they stumbled — and revise those spots.

6.16. Reviewer's-script test. Read your page imagining you must summarize it to a panel in 90 seconds. Could you, working only from the page? Revise anything you had to supply from memory.

Part M — Mixed Review

6.17. (From Ch 2) How does the aims page serve both the reviewers who read everything and the panelists who read only it?

6.18. (From Ch 5) Why should the aims page be drafted early, and how does it function as the proposal's spine?

6.19. (From Ch 3) Where does funder alignment appear on the aims page, and why so early?

Reflection

6.20. Learning check-in. Which comfortable failure pulled at you while drafting — the interesting-background hook, or the ambitious pile of aims? Name it, and one thing you did to resist it.