Running head: 50 CHARACTER VERSION OF TITLE IN CAPS 1

Title of Paper (up to 12 words)

Your Name, Including Middle Initial

School

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Abstract

A concise summary of each section of your paper, using up to 250 words. Note that you do not

indent the first line.

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Title of Paper

Your first paragraph (or two) should be an introduction to the broad topic of your paper.

Many people write the introduction after writing the rest of the paper! Information in your

introduction should provide a foundation for the hypotheses of your experiment. In your

introduction, your goal is to convince readers that your research topic is (a) interesting and (b)

important. You may choose to begin your paper with a story, quotation, or relevant statistics

about your topic. You can think of your paper as a story about your dependent variable.

You generally will present broad background information about the topic in the first

paragraph of so. You will include at least two sections in the body of your paper. You will

summarize relevant information from prior research studies in the first section, which we refer to

as the “literature review” portion of a paper. You will present your detailed research proposal in

the second section (details are provided below). Some overall formatting rules to keep in mind

are: (a) use Times New Roman font, size 12; and (b) double-space the entire paper.

Information about the Literature-review Section

Content. In the first section of your paper, you should provide a literature review of prior

research and theory that relates to your experiment. The information you present should be from

diverse sources (e.g., journal articles, book chapters, web sites). Make sure it is clear to the

reader how information is related to your experimental hypotheses or procedure. So, if you are

using their method, then talk about their method; if they found similar results, talk about their

results; if they operationally defined their DV like you want to, then talk about that, etc. To make

this section of your paper effective, you should explicitly relate information from various sources

to each other and to your proposed research. After you discuss past research, you should make it

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clear how your study is the next logical one, that your study improves upon past studies, that

your study fills obvious holes left by the others.

Citation of sources. You should cite references throughout the body of your paper.

There are two ways to cite a source. The authors can be listed in the sentence, with the year in

parentheses: “The Davis (2001) web site presents information about American Psychological

Association (APA) style rules.” Alternatively, the citation can be entirely in parentheses: “The

web site presents information about American Psychological Association (APA) style rules

(Davis, 2001).” These are the only two acceptable ways to cite sources in APA style. When

citing a journal article, you should never include the title of the paper or the first names or initials

of the authors.

There are additional important rules when sources have more than one author. When

listing multiple authors in the text, write out the word “and”: “Brown and Milstead (1968)

examined . .” When listing multiple authors in parentheses, use the symbol “&” rather than the

word “and”: “The research findings were consistent with hypotheses (Brown & Milstead,

1968).” Another important rule applies to sources with three or more authors. The first time you

cite the article, list all three authors (e.g., Green, Campbell, & Finkel, 2001); any subsequent

time you cite the article, list the first author followed by the words “et al.” (e.g., Green et al.,

2001).Write a research proposal NOT a research paper on the following topic:

“Do time outs and their role improve the safety & quality in surgery?”

Please include at least 4 references and all must be scholarly sources written within the last five years. In the literature review section, include how the data was collected.
Please see the attached instructions.