How to do your own experiments in psychology and education
3a. Plan before you begin to write
To plan your writing well, you need to:
The first section of a research paper (the “introduction” or “Lit Review”) has several goals. Keeping these goals in mind will help you decide how to choose, organize, and present the information in your Lit Review.
These are the most important goals of the Lit Review:
However, none of your readers will believe anything that you say if you don’t write like a professional researcher. Grammar, punctuation, and spelling are very important in presenting research. You are trying to present yourself as someone who can understand complex research, so simple things like spelling shouldn’t be a problem for you, right?
The next sections will help you plan your Lit Review then research and write up each of its sections. Before you submit or circulate your Lit Review, it is essential to review it very carefully to achieve a professional writing style. Your reputation as a professional depends on how well you write!
Pars of the Lit Review: Make a detailed outline
Your outline is a plan for reading and writing about the research literature that you have found. When you have a clear outline to start from, you can easily identify the parts of the Lit Review and you know what information to find for each part. So, you can focus on one part of the outline, read only the material that is relevant for that part and then write that part as well before moving on to another part of your outline. The outline helped guide your literature search and now it will guide what to concentrate on when you are reading and writing. The outline below is a good place to start.
Research on writing shows that expert writers start from a clear idea of the goals they have – or the questions they want to answer – for each section of what they write. These goals help them decide what is relevant and what is not, and clear goals make it easier for them to see whether or not they are making progress. You can do the same thing. The items in an outline describe the writer’s goal for each section and help the writer decide what is relevant to read.
Researchers organize Lit Reviews in a wide range of different ways, often depending on the kind of problem or audience that they want to address. There are several sample Lit Reviews included in this Task Package so that you can see how other authors write them [See Sample Lit Reviews].
This outline below shows representative parts of a Lit Review. (Imagine that each dash [“-“] represents a sentence or paragraph. The number of sentences/paragraphs is not the real number that you should use. The section titles are just to indicate structure. You should NOT word them like this in your Lit Review.) Remember that this is just a start: your outline should go into more detail for each section.
Opening (The problem and the importance of studying this problem)
The effects of Factor 1 on your sub-process
What is still not known about your sub-process?
Most reports of experimental research use “issues-based” or “topical” Lit Reviews, rather than historical ones. An issues-based Lit Review focuses on results and conclusions from other studies, rather than focus on the authors or their methods – this already gives you a hint about which parts of each publication to read most carefully. Also, rather than organizing the information in chronological or historical order, for an issues-based Lit Review, the author groups the information with separate sections or paragraphs about each factor (or group of factors) that affect the sub-process.
Now take the outline above and adapt it to your research problem. For each paragraph, state what the main idea of that paragraph will be. Here is an example from a student project on The Effects of Sex and Stereotype Threat on Mathematical Problem Solving Ability. In this case, several of the topics were written up in only one or two sentences and each section ended up being one to three paragraphs long.
Opening
- Women are underrepresented in the workplace
- they have fewer opportunities
- their talents are not used
General Background [Process: Problem solving, sub-process: Math problem solving]
- Overview of important factors
- Problem Type
- Situational influences
- Kinds of problem solving
Effects of gender on mathematical problem solving [Factor 1: Gender]
- Sex differences change with age.
- Negative attitudes and socialization may contribute.
- Genetic factors may play a role.
- Sex differences change with test difficulty.
Effects of stereotype threat on mathematical problem solving [Factor 2: stereotype threat]
- Effects of stereotype threat generally
- Effects of stereotype threat on math
- Triggers of stereotype threat
Effects of gender and stereotype threat on mathematical problem solving
- Effects of stereotype threat on males
- Effects of stereotype threat on females
Closing paragraph
By doing this now, you will be planning before you write. It is much, much harder to plan and write at the same time.
Read this topic next: Sort and prioritize your sources
- Understand the goals and parts of your Lit Review (see below)
- Sort and prioritize your sources for each part
- Develop a Reading Strategy so you don't read the wrong things
- Develop a Writing Strategy so you don't get stuck
The first section of a research paper (the “introduction” or “Lit Review”) has several goals. Keeping these goals in mind will help you decide how to choose, organize, and present the information in your Lit Review.
These are the most important goals of the Lit Review:
- 1) To make sure that the readers have a very clear idea of what problem you are studying. This also forces you to formulate your research problem in simpler, clearer terms for yourself.
- 2) To convince the readers that your problem is important to study and important enough for them to keep reading (“it’s interesting” is no good!).
- 3) To make sure that the readers understand all the facts and background that you think are relevant (so that they can understand your way of thinking) – basically, to provide an overview of what is known about your problem. This background information implicitly assures the reader that what you are doing makes sense – since other people have studied your problem or related problems in similar ways. It also prepares the reader to understand very clearly the importance of what you want to accomplish with this particular study.
- 4) To create the impression that you, the author, are a well-informed, clear-thinking professional, so that readers will believe your results.
However, none of your readers will believe anything that you say if you don’t write like a professional researcher. Grammar, punctuation, and spelling are very important in presenting research. You are trying to present yourself as someone who can understand complex research, so simple things like spelling shouldn’t be a problem for you, right?
The next sections will help you plan your Lit Review then research and write up each of its sections. Before you submit or circulate your Lit Review, it is essential to review it very carefully to achieve a professional writing style. Your reputation as a professional depends on how well you write!
Pars of the Lit Review: Make a detailed outline
Your outline is a plan for reading and writing about the research literature that you have found. When you have a clear outline to start from, you can easily identify the parts of the Lit Review and you know what information to find for each part. So, you can focus on one part of the outline, read only the material that is relevant for that part and then write that part as well before moving on to another part of your outline. The outline helped guide your literature search and now it will guide what to concentrate on when you are reading and writing. The outline below is a good place to start.
Research on writing shows that expert writers start from a clear idea of the goals they have – or the questions they want to answer – for each section of what they write. These goals help them decide what is relevant and what is not, and clear goals make it easier for them to see whether or not they are making progress. You can do the same thing. The items in an outline describe the writer’s goal for each section and help the writer decide what is relevant to read.
Researchers organize Lit Reviews in a wide range of different ways, often depending on the kind of problem or audience that they want to address. There are several sample Lit Reviews included in this Task Package so that you can see how other authors write them [See Sample Lit Reviews].
This outline below shows representative parts of a Lit Review. (Imagine that each dash [“-“] represents a sentence or paragraph. The number of sentences/paragraphs is not the real number that you should use. The section titles are just to indicate structure. You should NOT word them like this in your Lit Review.) Remember that this is just a start: your outline should go into more detail for each section.
Opening (The problem and the importance of studying this problem)
- -
- -
- -
- -
The effects of Factor 1 on your sub-process
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
What is still not known about your sub-process?
- -
- -
Most reports of experimental research use “issues-based” or “topical” Lit Reviews, rather than historical ones. An issues-based Lit Review focuses on results and conclusions from other studies, rather than focus on the authors or their methods – this already gives you a hint about which parts of each publication to read most carefully. Also, rather than organizing the information in chronological or historical order, for an issues-based Lit Review, the author groups the information with separate sections or paragraphs about each factor (or group of factors) that affect the sub-process.
Now take the outline above and adapt it to your research problem. For each paragraph, state what the main idea of that paragraph will be. Here is an example from a student project on The Effects of Sex and Stereotype Threat on Mathematical Problem Solving Ability. In this case, several of the topics were written up in only one or two sentences and each section ended up being one to three paragraphs long.
Opening
- Women are underrepresented in the workplace
- they have fewer opportunities
- their talents are not used
General Background [Process: Problem solving, sub-process: Math problem solving]
- Overview of important factors
- Problem Type
- Situational influences
- Kinds of problem solving
Effects of gender on mathematical problem solving [Factor 1: Gender]
- Sex differences change with age.
- Negative attitudes and socialization may contribute.
- Genetic factors may play a role.
- Sex differences change with test difficulty.
Effects of stereotype threat on mathematical problem solving [Factor 2: stereotype threat]
- Effects of stereotype threat generally
- Effects of stereotype threat on math
- Triggers of stereotype threat
Effects of gender and stereotype threat on mathematical problem solving
- Effects of stereotype threat on males
- Effects of stereotype threat on females
Closing paragraph
By doing this now, you will be planning before you write. It is much, much harder to plan and write at the same time.
Read this topic next: Sort and prioritize your sources
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© 2009 Created by Mike Dillinger, PhD on Ning. Create a Ning Network!
