For your Research Paper, you will use your articles to provide background and context for your research study and build arguments and conclusions about your research study findings.
Sections
1. Title Page
2. Abstract: a summary of your project and its findings, which should tell the whole story of your study, including:
- the overall purpose of the study and research problem(s) you investigated
- the basic design and methods of the study
- the major findings and trends found in your analysis of the study results
- a brief summary of your interpretations and conclusions
3. Introduction: Summarizes your study and puts it in context:
- Start the introduction with a statement about your study hypothesis that includes background from your articles contextualizing how your research questions fit into this current research area
- Provide a compelling narrative about how the articles you've read demonstrate a specific issue or problem that makes the case for why your research study is important
- End with an explicit statement about your study hypothesis
4. Methods: provides detailed information about your research study design. Your Methods section should include:
- the study populations and subject recruitment procedures
- the experimental design of your study and why it was appropriate for your research area
- the procedures your research design followed
- the statistical analyses that you ran
5. Results: report the findings of your research study, written in the past tense, without bias or interpretation. Your Results section should:
- Focus on being concise and objective
- Organize your results around tables and figures that summarize the results of your statistical analyses
- Create your own tables and figures with clear labels. Do not copy and paste from SPSS or other statistics programs into your paper.
- Include summary text that describes the results in your tables and figures
- Describe the trends in your data but do not interpret it
- Organize your key findings in a logical sequence, generally following your Methods section
- Don't omit relevant findings, even those that don't support your predictions
6. Discussion: interpret and describe the significance of your findings in light of what is already known about the research area you're investigating. Your Findings and Discussion should include:
- Restate your research hypothesis from the introduction in different words
- Explanation of results: whether or not the results were expected, explanations for the results, and patterns and trends that emerged from your results and their meanings
- References to previous research: compare your results with findings from other studies
- Use evidence from research sources to build arguments about what your study findings mean
- Analyze your evidence and observations to show how they link to your broader research question
- How would you improve this study if you did it again? How would you extend the study to further address your research area?
- End with a strong, final statement that ties the whole paper together and makes it clear the paper has come to an end
7. References List: a list of the sources you cited. Go to Cite in APA Style to put together your citations and format your References List in APA style (7th ed.)
- follow the Quick Reference Guide, In-Text Citations and Journal Articles links for guidelines and templates
- follow the Create an APA References List link and use the References list at the end of the Sample Student Paper
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