Carolyn L. Blake
Kent Intermediate School District
Health Sciences Early College Academy
March, 2012 APA Research Paper: A HSECA Student Experience
Abstract
The abstract is a summary of your entire paper. It should include your thesis statement and key points or ideas of what the paper is about. It should also describe where you found your information (for example: A literary search was conducted and information compared) and any conclusions that you have made as a result of the research. The abstract is its’ own page and is double spaced. It should be 150 – 250 words. APA Research Paper: A HSECA Student Experience
Introduce your topic in this paragraph. Include your thesis statement and your key points that you will be talking about in the paper. Notice that it doesn’t say “introduction” at the top of the page. Your introduction can be more than one paragraph; it is an expansion of the abstract. If you were conducting your own research you would need to include information about how you set up the experiment. What was the hypothesis? What was your method of research? Did you conduct a survey? Did you conduct chemical analysis? If you created your own research then of course you would need to present your findings in the form of data tables and or figures and graphs.
Discussion
After the introduction you need to discuss your findings. Since this is a literature review (for the most part) you can present information from each source and then tie them all together or you could