The goal of this assignment is for students to have the opportunity to practice doing self-guided research and documenting their findings. Students will choose a topic from the pre-approved research topic list to research and submit a 5-6page research essay about their topic. The research essay should follow all 7th edition APA guidelines for formatting and referencing and be supported by at least five academic sources (USA Today, Wikipedia, Bodybuilding.com, etc. are not acceptable scholarly sources).
The paper should contain a title page, introduction, body, conclusion, and reference sheet. (It is important to note that the title page and reference sheet do not count toward the 5-6pages.) You will be graded on content (what you say) and flow (how you say it). The paper should reflect a deep understanding of the chosen topic, APA guidelines, and university-level writing expectations. NOTE: Assignments with severe grammatical and spelling issues (10+ per page) will receive a grade of zero.Please review the grading rubric for a more thorough breakdown of how your assignment will be marked.
Additionally, you are not permitted to use generative AI (Chat GPT or anything similar) to write your research paper. Papers suspected of using generative AI will not be graded and will be sent to the associate dean for an academic misconduct review.
Further, I recommend reviewing the example research paper to understand how a well-written research paper looks. NOTE: While the example paper shows images and figures in the paper, you are NOT permitted to use graphs, images, or figures in your paper. If you feel something like that will enhance your paper, you may add an appendices and include it there, but an appendices will not count toward your page count. You must have 5-6 pages of written text for this assignment.
Students will upload an electronic copy of their paper to the appropriate hand-in link on UR courses. The file name should be “YOUR LAST NAME_ResearchPaper”. The assignment should be uploaded as an editable Word document. PDFs will receive an automatic 10% deduction. Corrupt files that cannot be openedwill receive an automatic 20% deduction. I highly recommend double-checking that an outside source can open your file before submitting it.
Heres an example paper refer to it
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_formatting_and_style_guide/documents/APA%207%20Student%20Sample%20Paper.pdf
