What you write needs to: a make sense b be clear and c not be factually incorrect. In each section, discuss support for the broad principles of democracy separately from support for democracy in concrete instances. In the intro and discussion, keep in mind that you are focusing on the concepts or ideas.

In the method and results, you focus almost exclusively on the specific questions you asked and the responses you received. Describe what they were interested in, how they examined it, what they found, and what they thought briefly 1 3 sentences describe the other studies you have found, unless they are killer killer studies that are great and directly related to your study and make great points that prothro amp grigg did not make. Note: this previous sentence is a run on you should not actually write like that. Do you think you will still find a consensus of support for broad principles of democracy, but not consensus in concrete cases? why or why not? do you think your college sample will produce similar or different results than the other sample? why? whatever your hypotheses and reasons for them, state them explicitly! use section headers and subheaders to organize your intro.

For example you are not required you've had the opportunity to read, summarize, critique, and synthesize the primary literature now, it's time for you to join in as a writer, too. The survey you've created qualifies as doing research and the end process of doing research is to communicate it. In addition to presenting your survey information to your colleagues, your group will also write a brief research report in the classic imrd format. Your survey paper will have at least 1 figure in it, most likely a graph of some kind.

But in this assignment you are writing a proper research report, albeit a short paper of limited scientific validity but with good clinical utility, further supporting your practice of evidence based medicine. Research reports what most people mean when they refer to the write up of original experimental research have 4 sections: introduction materials/methods results discussion. Each section has its own purpose that is, a particular part of the research process it is supposed to communicate.

introduction

the introduction to a research report accomplishes two goals: informs the reader by providing information from the research literature necessary to understanding the project persuades the reader that the research question is valid by providing the gap in the literature. How are these goals accomplished? the writer provides a brief review of the literature in the correct order given below!.

Homework Strategies for College Students

The content of the introduction informs the organization of the introduction persuades. 5 steps to writing the introduction 1 establish topic 2 provide significance 3 review the relevant literature 4 point out the gap 5 reveal the research question and sometimes, hypotheses the materials and methods section is very different from the introduction. The litmus test of a successful methods section is that after reading it, the reader could replicate the research. The ability of a method to be replicated is a key ingredient to judgments of validity, and is one of the reasons why we are so fond of quantitative studies. The materials and methods section is written in the past tense, and includes the ingredients of the study materials and the process for doing it methods. At the most basic, a methods section has three parts: participants who or what was studied , instruments materials used , and procedure the steps researchers followed.

Because research varies so much, you will encounter many different ways of expressing these three parts. Regardless of what the sections are called, these three kinds of information must be explained. The fun part of what you think the results means gets written in the discussion section. In fact, the wise writer uses graphs and figures to highlight the most important or interesting information. For instance, it may be that our data will show no real effect on whether a family owns a computer and whether an individual owns a computer. The results section may also be divided according to subheadings, especially if there were very strong trends or if there were multiple phases of the project.

However, the fun of results is not so much in the writing as in the analysis itself. Since the results section must use both verbal explanation and numerical explanation, its worth your time to write out a sentence or two about each of the various relationships you notice in the data. Honestly, the reader is perfectly capable of looking at a bar graph and noting for themselves that 17.2% of first time computer users were between ages 4 and 5. So it is not to your benefit or the readers to write out a sentence describing every detail. Instead, create a couple of interesting graphs that juxtapose the relationships youd most like the reader to notice. Thus creating figures is a strategic way of highlighting information by juxtaposing salient results without actually going so far as to provide interpretation. You also need to have the basic data available for the reader, and this is where tables are quite useful.

One thing to keep in mind if you create a graph, then it is because you wish to say something about this in the discussion section.if you are using a stats program, then you should report significances when appropriate.

discussion

the discussion section is where interpretation gets done, limitations are pointed out, and speculation occurs. This is usually the section everyone has been waiting to write! however, before you get too excited, there is a manner of doing so that is pretty specific. First, in terms of organization, the first paragraph of the discussion section begins with a restatement of the research question with an answer to it based on the results. You may recall from the reading science chapters that scientific writing is organized to allow opportunistic reading. This means that information must occur in certain places or youve violated readers expectations.

This is why writers must always revise! following the initial rq answer duet is a rather different means of interpretation and speculation than you may have encountered before. For every result you find important enough to mention, you should find some evidence in the current literature that your data either supports, contradicts, or extends. For example, our findings did not support those found in the television literature where adult mediation improves childrens learning of content, particularly girls learning of verbally presented content e.g. Instead, we found no impact of adult mediation on childrens learning of verbal content, and attention was actually higher with time when the adult followed the childs lead for interactive media 587. Or, results can support and extend previous research: this study thus confirmed foster et al.s 1994 finding that experience with a high quality interactive computer program can enhance phonological awareness in young children.

The present study, however, significantly added to this previous research by adding a more appropriate control group, by taking the classroom environment into consideration, and by posttesting the children after they had received a few months of beginning reading instruction 314. Another quality you may have noticed is that it doesnt feel like the authors are really making a specific claim. Although there are places where they are unequivocal about reporting results ex: efforts to take control were particularly pronounced for boys, who are generally more aggressive and, hence, more assertive than girls in their interaction styles maccoby, 1998 ruble amp martin, 1998 , the researchers dont come right out and state just as strongly what they think that piece of evidence means. Instead, the authors use hedge words, such as may and seem or create careful assertions with phrases like it is harder to imagine, for example: that childrens visual attention increasingly drops off with time in conditions when the adult controls the mouse and reads the story is suggestive: children, particularly boys, seem to get bored across repetitions when they are not in charge of the activity. In fact, this is how the communication of discovery is managed very, very carefully.

Many times over the course of science history, whole belief systems have been changed because new data has been found or old ideas proved inaccurate. We know better than to state conclusively what a particular piece of evidence means. What if technology emerges so that we can test something more accurately? what happens when a new theory is proposed that better explains the current data? rather than claiming a thing is true or proved, practicing scientists offer best guesses assertions about what might be true based on what we know right now.