For your Final Paper, you will use your articles to build arguments and conclusions about your research study findings.
Sections
1. Title Page
- Include a title that reflects the main focus of your research paper
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
- brief information on the 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. Keywords: about 4 to 7 keywords
- key words are one word or a very short phrase that summarize the main concepts of your study
4. Literature Review Introduction: a review of the literature that you used to build your research study hypothesis. It should:
- Be more than a summary of the articles you read
- Provide a compelling narrative about how the articles you've read have built up to your research questions and study and make the case for why your research questions and study are important
- Bring together theories and results from a number of studies to provide background for your project and demonstrate how your research study hypothesis fits into this current research area
- Expand on the studies that informed your research, focusing on themes, trends, and key findings
- Discuss gaps, inconsistencies, or limitations in the current research that your study aims to address
5. Hypothesis
- Briefly recap the hypothesis or research questions that guide your study
- Be specific about the variables your study will investigate
- If your study is experimental, specific your independent and dependent variables
- If your study in non-experimental, define your predictor and criterion variables
6. Methods: provides detailed information about your research study design. Your Method section should include:
- Participants:
- characteristics of your study population sample
- subject recruitment procedures
- sampling method
- justification for participant selection
- Materials:
- details about your study's instruments, surveys, or experimental stimuli.
- include brief information about their reliability and validity, if applicable
- Experimental Design
- the experimental design of your study (i.e. experimental, correlational, etc.) and why it was appropriate for your research area
- describe whether your design is within-subjects, between-subjects, or mixed methods
- Procedures
- outline the steps of your study, from recruitment to data collection
- include consent procedures and ethical considerations
7. Statistical Analyses
- the statistical analyses that you used to analyze your data, i.e. t-tests, ANOVA, regression, chi-square, etc.
- justify your choice of statistical tests based on your hypotheses, data type, and research design
- mention any assumptions or preliminary data checks, i.e. normality, homogeneity, etc.
8. 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
9. 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
10. References: a list of the sources you cited in this Research Paper
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