When writing papers it is sometimes a good idea to know the structure of what you are writing before you start. The American Psychological Association 5th edition is the current requirement for classes on citation and style. There are a variety of templates out there to help your writing but as to writing an outline we want to achieve a couple of things. We want to know where things go, we want to know what the citation style is going to be, and we want to know the structure of the arguments we are going to make. The following almost totally can be found in the APA 5 style guide currently available.
The following is all taken from the APA5 Publications Manual. You would fill in as appropriate your content and expand as needed. If you don’t have a good research question, or introduction you haven’t done the first assignments correctly. If you look the introduction is basically what you needed to do when turning in a topic. The rest of this should be populated by your annotated bibliography. If you can’t fill in sections as given here you have some more research to do. Some students will insert a “Literature Review” after the introduction and that is fine. Especially for upper division and graduate students. The example below is an example not a rule. Some students may not have much of a methodology but they should be working on that.
[WARNING HTML DOES NOT DISPLAY OUTLINES CORRECTLY. THIS IS JUST AN EXAMPLE]
- Introduction
- Introduce the problem (APA5, Page 15)
- Why is this problem important? Cite sources that support this point.
- How does the hypothesis and experimental design support the resolution? Cite sources that support this point.
- What are the theoretical implications? Cite sources that support this point.
- Who is this important too, who are the stakeholders, who will be effected by this? Cite sources that support this point.
- Why should we care, why should it be important to us? Cite sources that support this point.
- What is the rationale?
- Who has studied this before?
- What were their results?
- Cite sources that support this point.
- What is your research question?
- Can the research question be measured?
- Is the research question done by anybody else?
- Introduce the problem (APA5, Page 15)
- Method (APA5, Page 17)
- Identify a study methodology
- Were there participants or subjects in this process (e.g. surveys)?
- Was there an Institutional Review Board approval?
- Were there any issues with IRB approval?
- What are the independent variables?
- What are the dependent variables?
- Were there participants or subjects in this process (e.g. surveys)?
- What kind of apparatus did you use (software, hardware, machines, tools)?
- Provide detailed tables of the tools
- Be exact so do include CPU type and amount of RAM
- What was the procedure you used? Did you have methods of validating the procedure? Cite sources that support this point.
- Models and procedures are important they can be found in the literature review process.
- The scientific method does not fit how-to articles but there is a how-to methodology you should cite.
- Who has used this procedure in the past? Cite sources that support this point.
- What were their results?
- Were there significant differences?
- Delimitations, what you can’t do because of the process, procedures, or scientific validity.
- Limitations, what you won’t do because you are unwilling or unable to do something.
- Identify a study methodology
- Results
- What proof do you have that your results were valid? Cite sources that support this point.
- Were there any issues with the methodology chosen?
- Were any results of interest or deleted for any reason?
- Was there statistical anamolies?
- How will you verify the results?
- Do you have screen shots of the output?
- What kind of statistics did you do?
- Conclusion
- Were there any surprises or impacts that were unexected?
- What kind of impact will this have?
- Was the research question answered?
- What was the answer?
- What further work can be done?
- Bibliography “This will be the bibliography”