Sections
1. 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
2. Introduction: a review of the literature that describes your study experiment. 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 experiment and demonstrate how your experiment fits into this current research area
- Be a compelling narrative about how the articles you've read make the case for why your experiment is important
- End with your study hypothesis
3. 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
4. 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
5. 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
6. Bibliography: a list of the sources you cited (not your annotated bibliography)
For more writing help, contact the Writing Center and make an online appointment to meet with one of their consultants.
