Introduction (approximately 7-10 pages):
▪ Foreground and background of the topic: Introduce your paper by providing some history and background on your particular topic
▪ Statement of the problem or issue; Explain why the topic is important to address.
➢ Introduce your study:
▪ Why are you testing the hypothesis (quantitative studies)? What is your research question (qualitative and quantitative studies) Is it based on prior research? If yes, this research should be discussed above and connected to the present project.
▪ State the purpose and rationale of the present study.
▪ Introduce your research question and predicted outcome. Here, you want to use language as direct and literal as, “In this study, I (or we if you are working in a pair/group), examined the effects of lack of sleep on academic performance.” If you have a hypothesis, state it clearly in this section, by stating, “I/we predict that there is a direct correlation between quality/quantity of sleep and academic performance.”
➢ Situate the present study (yours) in the context of past research. This portion is referred to as the “Literature Review.”
▪ You are required to cite a minimum of 12 to 15journal articles or books. When appropriate use the following to generate the content of yourliterature review. Remember that you are not creating annotated bibliographies here, but demonstrating a relationship among sources. The information you include from each source does not need to follow a mechanical review for each source. Use what you think is relevant to answering your research question.
▪ Summarize method used (experimental, survey, interview, etc)—What did they do?
▪ Summarize findings—What did they find?
▪ Do the findings support or contradict other research or theories related to the topic?
▪ What did the authors conclude?
▪ State why this is relevant to your study
➢ Method (approximately 3-5 pages)
▪ Describe the step-by-step method used to collect data
▪ Where did you find the literature you included?
▪ What were the search terms and/or databases you used?
▪ Describe how you operationalized the variables under study
▪ If appropriate, describe how you constructed your measures (were they borrowed from previous studies? If yes, be sure to cite the studies that you borrowed from. Did you do pilot testing?)
▪ Describe the procedures used to collect data (i.e., what was your sampling strategy? Convenience sampling? Quota sampling? Random sampling?)
▪ Describe the demographic characteristics of your sample (i.e., age, race, gender, social class, etc.)
Results (approximately 1-2 pages ): NOTE: Results and the Results section are only for quantitative or mixed method studies.
Discussion (approximately 6-10 pages)
▪ Recaps the results in plain language
▪ Interprets the results- what do they mean?
▪ States whether findings support the original hypothesis
▪ Explains why you think the findings occurred the way that they did
▪ States whether the findings support or contradict other research (these should be the ones that are reviewed in the intro/lit review). How do present findings fit (or not) with the literature in general?
▪ States real world implications
▪ Makes note of limitations and delimitation
▪ Suggests directions for future research
▪ References pages must be in APA format
▪ Use APA 7th Edition, for citations
