Pap 5

Iwant to highlight some things to keep in mind for your final class paper (Paper V: The Final Paper),. Paper V will have a title page, an abstract, a literature review (study one), a methods section (study one), a results section (study one), a brief discussion section (study one), a literature review (study two), a methods section (study two), a results section (study two), a brief discussion section (study two), a longer overall discussion section, references, and an appendix of SPSS tables from study two. The good news is that you have already done a lot of this paper! You will be able to reuse Paper III and Paper IV nearly in their entirety for your final paper (revising based those papers on our comments, of course). The new parts for Paper V will be your abstract and your general discussion.

1. 1. 1. For your Abstract, you have to talk about a lot of stuff in a short paragraph. You need to talk about your participants, your hypotheses, your methods, your results, and your discussion across both studies. This is harder than it sounds – trying to summarize your 20 + page paper in paragraph is tough! However, look at some of the articles you cited – they wrote an abstract, which is what you read on PsycInfo. You are doing the same thing. Keep in mind that I also want to see some keywords and/or keyphrases. Just like you used keywords / phrases in your PsycInfo searches, as an author you need to provide keywords/phrases that describe your own study. I’d suggest “belief perseverance” as at least one, but come up with a few on your own as well, especially one focusing on your second IV.
      2. For your General Discussion section, you should sum up your study and talk about future directions. My hints here to start by restating your hypotheses from both studies. Then talk about whether your results support or do not support the hypotheses across both studies. My preference is that you also refer back to studies you cited in your lit review and compare/contrast your results with others’ results. If they match, great! This gives you more confidence that your study has some concurrent validity. If they mismatch, try to figure out why they may differ. In addition, your discussion should focus on study limitations. What could / should you have done differently? All studies have limitations, so mention some. You might then describe how future studies can take what you learned in your study a step further. That is, what are your future directions? The discussion should be one page minimum, but I honestly don’t think you can do it justice in one page. It might take at least two pages (hint). If you cite any brand new authors in the discussion (something that I love to see), make sure to include them in the references section. Speaking of references, make sure they are in APA format. We will be very nitpicky in this area when it comes to grading!

Just a few more items about Paper V. First, we may not give you a lot of feedback on Paper V. We did that a lot with prior papers, and simply lack the time to give a lot of feedback this time. Second, I find that students often use Paper V as a writing sample when they apply for jobs or graduate school or ask for a letter of recommendation from someone who wants to see what your writing skills are like. Keep that in mind. The better the paper, the better the writing sample. Also keep in mind that those programs may not know much about your topic, so write it for an audience who may be unfamiliar with your topic (but knows research methods). Finally, your instructor may not have access to your paper beyond this semester (Canvas tends to delete items rather than retaining them indefinitely). Download your paper and keep it on your own hard drive. Your instructor may not be able to access it beyond this semester, so if you ever need it again you cannot rely on your instructor having access to it.