USING APA STYLE

1. USING APA STYLE Slides 1-8 of following presentation are adapted from The Little, Brown Handbook, Ninth Ed. Research Report with Survey The APA manual specifies the following outline for the text of a research report: • Abstract • Introduction • Method • Results • Discussion

2. Research Report with Survey • Abstract: a summary (about 100 words) of the subject, the research method, the findings, and the conclusions. See Sample here. • Introduction: a presentation of the problem researched, the research method used, the background (other studies), and the hypothesis tested.

3. Research Report with Survey • Methods: a detailed discussion of how the research was conducted, including a description of the research subjects, any materials or tools used (such as surveys or questionnaires), and the procedure followed.

4. Research Report with Survey a summary of the data collected and how they were statistically analyzed, along with a detailed presentation of the data, often in tables, graphs, or charts. • Results:

5. Research Report with Survey • Discussion: an interpretation of the data and presentation of conclusions, related to the original hypothesis. (When the discussion is brief, it may be combined with the previous section under the heading “Results and Discussion.”)

6. Research Report with Survey Conducting a Survey • Think about why you are interested in a topic. Decide what you want to find out—what your hypothesis is. What questions will you ask? What’s your purpose? • Define your population. Who is your hypothesis about? Women who smoke? Ten-year-old children? Plan to sample enough of this population so that your findings will be representative.

7. Research Report with Survey Conducting a Survey • Write your questions. • Closed Questions direct the respondent’s answers: checklists, multiple-choice, true/false, or yes/no. • Open-ended questions allow brief, descriptive answers. How will you interpret these? • AVOID LOADED QUESTIONS that reveal your own biases or that make assumptions: • Should we stop murdering civilians in war? • How much more money does your father make than your mother?

8. Research Report with Survey Conducting a Survey • Test your questions. Use a few respondents and discuss the clarity, comfort-level, and answerability of the questions with them. • Tally the results. Count the actual numbers of answers. Include the nonanswers. • Look for patterns that emerge from the data. Do the patterns confirm your hypothesis? Contradict it? Revise your hypothesis or conduct more research if necessary.

9. Research Report with Survey: See Sample Format Title page: Include a running head for publication, title, byline, and affiliation. Page numbers with running head: In the upper right-hand corner of each page, include a 1-2 word version of your title. Follow with five spaces and then the page number. From The OWL at Purdue Website http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/

10. How Not to Plagiarize • http://www.utoronto.ca/writing/plagsep.html • Written by Margaret Procter, Coordinator of Writing Support, University of Toronto • Can't I avoid problems just by listing every source in the bibliography? No. • If I put the ideas into my own words, do I still have to clog up my pages • with all those names and numbers? Yes. • I didn't know anything about the subject until I started this paper. Do I • have to acknowledge every point I make? Better to be safe than sorry. • How can I tell what's my own idea and what has come from somebody • else? Careful record-keeping helps. • So what exactly do I have to document? • Quotations, paraphrases, or summaries: • e.g. As Morris puts it in The Human Zoo (1983), “We can always be sure that today's daring innovation will be tomorrow's respectability" (p. 189).Specific facts used as evidence for your argument or interpretation:e.g. Other recent researchers (Monroe, 2006) confirm the findings that drug treatment has little effect in the treatment of pancreatic pseudocysts. • Distinctive or authoritative ideas, whether you agree with them or not: • e.g. One writer (Von Daniken, 1970) even argues that the Great Pyramid was built for the practical purpose of guiding navigation.

11. Research Report: Writing a Summary How would you summarize these ideas? The cause of autism has also been a matter of dispute. Its incidence is about one in a thousand, and it occurs throughout the world, its features remarkably consistent even in extremely different cultures. It is often not recognized in the first year of life, but tends to become obvious in the second or third year. Though Asperger regarded it as a biological defect of affective contact—innate, inborn, analogous to a physical or intellectual defect—Kanner tended to view it as a psychogenic disorder, a reflection of bad parenting, and most especially of a chillingly remote, often professional, "refrigerator mother." At this time, autism was often regarded as "defensive" in nature, or confused with childhood schizophrenia. A whole generation of parents—mothers, particularly—were made to feel guilty for the autism of their children. Excerpted from Oliver Sacks’ essay “An Anthropologist on Mars.” Materials created by Jerry Plotnick, University College Writing Workshop, University of Toronto. Click here for details on summaries:http://www.utoronto.ca/ucwriting/paraphrase.html

12. Research Report Sample In-Text Citations for a Summary In “An Anthropologist on Mars,” Sacks notes that although there is little disagreement on the chief characteristics of autism, researches have differed considerably on its causes. As he points out, Asperger saw the condition as an innate defect in the child’s ability to connect with the external world, whereas Kanner regarded it as a consequence of harmful childrearing practices (247-48).

13. Research Report: Sample Abstract • Short: 2-3 paragraphs/100-150 words • 1st paragraph: Introduce the problem • 2nd paragraph: Describe your approach • 3rd paragraph: Brief conclusions and impact • Do not include bibliographic citations or mathematics. Embedded hard real-time software systems often need fine-grained parallelism and precise control of timing, things typical real-time operating systems do not provide. The Esterel language has both, but compiling large Esterel programs has been challenging, producing either needlessly slow or large code. This paper presents the first Esterel compiler able to compile large Esterel programs into fast, small code. By choosing a concurrent control-flow graph as its intermediate representation, it preserves many of the control constructs to produce code that can be a hundred times faster and half the size than that from other compilers with similar capacity. The primary contribution is an algorithm that generates efficient sequential code from a concurrent control-flow graph. While developed specifically for compiling Esterel, the algorithm could be used to compile other synchronous languages with fine-grained parallelism. Back to slide Click here for original source.