Sections
1. Introduction and Literature Review: a review of the literature that you used to build your research study hypothesis. Your Introduction should:
- Be more than a summary of the articles you read
- 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
- Be a compelling narrative about how the articles you've read have built up to your study and make the case for why your research study is important
- End with your study hypothesis
2. Methods: provides detailed information about your research study design. Your Methods section should include:
- The experimental design of your study and why it's appropriate for your research area
- Study populations and subject recruitment procedures
- The procedures your research design follows. including proposed data collection materials/measures
- Your data analysis plan
3. Results: report the expected 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 expected findings in a logical sequence, generally following your Methods section
- Describe the specific statistical analyses/models that you would have used
4. Proposed Discussion: interpret and describe the significance of your expected findings in light of what is already known about the research area you're investigating. Your discussion should:
- Use evidence and findings from research articles to build arguments about what your expected study findings would mean
- Use evidence and findings from research articles to build arguments about how your expected study findings would contribute to the research area
- Compare your expected results with findings from other previous research in the area
- Analyze your research design to discuss limitations to your proposed study
- Analyze your research design and expected findings to discuss important possible follow-up studies
- End with a strong final statement that ties the whole discussion together to give the big "take away" message of your proposed study and expected findings
5. References List: a list of the sources you cited
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