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Bloom, B. S. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals. David McKay.

Bowen, E. A., & Murshid, N. S. (2016). Trauma-informed social policy: A conceptual framework for policy analysis and advocacy. American Journal of Public Health, 106(2), 223-229. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2015.302970

Cabanac, M. (1986). Money versus pain: Experimental study of a conflict in humans. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 46, 37-44. https://doi.org/10.1901/jeab.1986.46-37

Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, & Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. (2018, December). Tri-Council policy statement: Ethical conduct for research involving humans (Catalogue No: RR4-2/2019E-PDF). https://www.pre.ethics.gc.ca/eng/policy-politique_tcps2-eptc2_2018.html

Cooley, B. N., Moore, S. E., & Sample, L. L. (2017). The role of formal social control mechanisms in deterring sex offending as part of the desistance process. Criminal Justice Studies, 30(2), 136-157. https://doi.org/10.1080/1478601X.2017.1299335

Craig, K. (1986). Social modeling influences: Pain in context. In R. A. Sternbach (Ed.), The psychology of pain (pp. 67-95). Raven.

Dhungel, R. (2017). “You are a Besya”: Microaggressions experienced by trafficking survivors exploited in the sex trade. Journal of Ethnic & Cultural Diversity in Social Work, 26(1/2), 126-138. https://doi.org/10.1080/15313204.2016.1272519

Duffy, M. E., & Symbaluk, D. G. (2019). Sociology graduate school requirements and competitive advantages. Canadian Journal of Family and Youth, 11(1), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.29173/cjfy29405

Symbaluk, D. G. (2006). Thomson Nelson guide to success in social science: Writing papers and exams. Thomson Nelson.

Frenzel, E. D., Bowen, K. N., Spraitz, J. D., Bowers, J. H., & Phaneuf, S. (2014). Understanding collateral consequences of registry laws: An examination of the perceptions of sex offender registrants. Justice Policy Journal, 11(2), 1-22.

Giampa, L. M., & Symbaluk, D. G. (2018). Successful transition off academic probation: A qualitative analysis. Canadian Journal of Family and Youth, 10(1), 73-97. https://doi.org/10.29173/cjfy29343

Hope Mission. (2019). Values. https://hopemission.com/about-us/values

Kaplan. (2011). Get into graduate school: A strategic approach for master’s and doctoral candidates (4th ed.). Kaplan Publishing.

Merton, R. K. (1968). Social theory and social structure. Free Press.

Mumby, D. G. (2012). Graduate school: Winning strategies for getting in (2nd ed.). Proto Press Publications.

Neimeyer, J. G., & Stevenson, D. (2008). The virtual advisor: Successful strategies for getting into graduate school in psychology. Sage Publications.

Reifman, A. S., Larrick, R. P., & Fein, S. (1999). Temper and temperature on the diamond: The heat-aggression relationship in major league baseball. In Edward Krupat’s (Ed.), Psychology is social (4th ed., pp. 306-313). Longman.

Symbaluk, D. G. (2019). Research methods: Exploring the social world in Canadian contexts (2nd. ed). Canadian Scholars.

Symbaluk, D. G., & Bereska, T. M. (2019). Sociology in action: A Canadian perspective (3^rd ed.). Nelson Education.

Symbaluk, D. G., Heth, D. C., Cameron, J., & Pierce, W. D. (1997). Social modeling, monetary incentives, and pain endurance: The role of self-efficacy and pain perception. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23, 258-269. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167297233005

Winters, G. M., Jeglic, E. L., Calkins, C., & Blasko, B. L. (2017). Sex offender legislation and social control: An examination of sex offenders’ expectations prior to release. Criminal Justice Studies, 30(2), 202-222. https://doi.org/10.1080/1478601X.2017.1299894

Exam Content is Your Professor’s Decision

Some professors prefer to give multiple-choice exams, while others prefer to give essay exams. Some deliver a final exam meant to test your knowledge of the entire course, while for others, the final exam focuses mostly on content learned in the last part of the course. In high school, teachers must follow a specific curriculum, and many of the final exams that high school students write in their last year are standardized across the province, state, or region, but this is no longer the case in university. Professors update and make substantial changes to their course content and exams from semester-to-semester, and professors teach their courses in unique ways such that classes vary from professor to professor. Therefore, it is important to consult your syllabus and your professor if you have questions about your exams. Do not rely on information you get from someone who is in a different course section or who had the same professor in a previous year.

Anything Assigned Over the Semester is Fair Game

Again, this marks another difference between writing exams in high school and writing exams in university. In high school, your teachers made sure to use class time to cover everything that would be on the exam. In university, there is an expectation that students will be responsible for more of their own learning, so if it is part of your assigned reading or viewing but is not covered in a class lecture, you might still be responsible for knowing it. Some professors provide students with detailed information about what to study for exams, such as providing learning objectives or practice quizzes, but this is likely to be the exception, not the rule.

Tips for Preparing for Open Book Exams

Know Your Textbook’s Table of Contents and Index

The table of contents will help you remember which chapters relate to question topics, and the index can help you target the locations of specific keywords in the text. You can also add your own key terms and words to the index and note the page numbers that have useful, relevant information.

Understand the Layout of Each Chapter

Many textbooks structure their information in specific ways. For instance, each chapter might start with an anecdote, followed by some information about why it is relevant. Then, each section might begin with key terms and definitions, followed by a case study, followed by a discussion. Is there a predictable pattern to how your chapters are laid out? Knowing this will help you quickly locate specific types of information, such as an example to use in a short answer response.

Limit Your Use of Flags, Bookmarks, or Sticky Notes

If your textbook has too many flags and sticky notes in it, you may find that you need to spend too much time flipping through all of these marked pages looking for something specific. Reserve your use of these highly visible markers for key information that you are likely going to have to refer to several times throughout the exam or for extra-special pieces of information that are highly specific and difficult to find using the contents and index pages, like examples, images, or quotations.

Use Margin Notations to Point to Other Helpful Sections

This is another useful way of cutting down on distracting flag or sticky note clutter. A quick “see page ___” note in a margin is an easy way to ensure you do not miss other helpful sections of the text and for you to remind yourself of good connections between ideas and content.

Multiple-choice exams also make it easier for students to budget their exam time. Most of the time, a multiple-choice exam will be designed so that there are about as many questions as there are minutes for the exam (e.g., a 50-minute exam will have around 50 questions, an 80-minute exam will have around 80 questions). Even if yours does not quite conform to that ratio, though, you should easily be able to determine the average amount of time you will have for each question. The other benefit for students, especially if the exam is put together using a publisher’s test bank, is that the wording used on the exam is likely to be similar to that used in the textbook, which can help with recall if students have been using the textbook to study.

Myths About Multiple-Choice Exams

Myth 1: Multiple-Choice Exams are Easy

Students tend to give a collective sigh of relief when they find out that their final exam will be multiple-choice, but especially as students move into university-level courses, these exams become harder. There is usually a right answer, along with one or two answers that could be right if one were to look at things a certain way but that are not the best answers, along with one or two that are wrong. The author of the exam questions might anticipate the types of wrong or not-quite-right answers you might think of and include them to test whether you are certain of the right answer or just looking for something that seems like it could be right. Also, our brains tend to want to look for information that looks familiar to us, so in an exam setting where we are naturally a little stressed, we are especially vulnerable to tricky multiple-choice questions.

Myth 2: Multiple-Choice Exams Test Only for Surface-Level Knowledge

This one usually comes from how people conceptualize Bloom’s (1956) Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, which has been used by many educational professionals to understand different types of learning and assessment. Remembering, understanding, or applying concepts is sometimes considered a less complex form of learning, whereas analysis, evaluation, and synthesis or creation is deemed to involve deeper, more complex forms of learning. Today, most educators recognize that learning is much more complicated and that it is not so easy to say that one “type” of learning or assessment is less involved than another. For example, an emergency-room doctor must demonstrate direct application of knowledge very quickly, but there is an awful lot of analysis and evaluation that must go into that knowledge application, and one could hardly argue that it counts as a “less-complex” form of learning and knowledge demonstration. Similarly, multiple-choice exams can be designed so that students use very high levels of critical thinking to demonstrate comprehension or application, so do not be lulled into believing that just because an exam is multiple-choice, it will be easy.

Myth 3: Multiple-Choice Answers Can Be Predicted By a Pattern

It might seem like there is a pattern to your multiple-choice exam, where there is an even distribution of A, B, C, and D answers so that there are never too many of one answer in a row. This might be true for an entire exam bank for a textbook, but only a fraction of those questions will be selected for the exam you write (and the instructor likely modifies those questions or makes up additional ones to correspond to lecture materials). When preparing exams, your professors focus their attention on the overall length of the exam, how many questions are dedicated to each unit or section of course content, and how well the questions align with the learning objectives they have set out for the course and included in the syllabus. It is unlikely that your professors have paid any attention to the pattern of responses until after they have finished putting the exam together. One of the authors makes up an exam with extra questions and then whittles them down to create a suitable exam, so what might start off as a more even distribution will not be the case for the actual test. She makes up an answer key after the exams have been printed, so any patterns that do emerge are entirely coincidental and should never be relied upon to guide your answers.

Types of Multiple-Choice Questions

Knowledge-Based Questions

These usually prompt a student to name a theorist, recall a fact, or define a concept from lectures and assigned readings. For example:

Comprehension Questions

These test your ability to interpret key ideas and are often found in multiple-choice questions that involve summary or explanation. For example:

Application-Based Questions

These usually involve questions that ask you to select the best demonstration of how a concept, perspective, or theory works in a real-life context. Sometimes you will have to use logical reasoning to infer the correct answer, or you might have to choose the best one based on the specific conditions presented in the question. An application question may even test critical thinking through the analysis of relationships or connections between events and ideas, as shown here:

Tips for Writing Multiple-choice Exams

Cover the Answers and Try to Answer the Questions

This is especially important when you are answering knowledge-based questions because in those cases, there is only one right answer, but other possible answers may look similar (e.g., one will use the word disease and the other will use the word disorder, but they will otherwise be the same), or they might be the correct answer to similar other questions in the exam. If you read them before you have had a chance to think about the question yourself, you are more likely to be thrown off by these almost-right answers. If you have been using sound study strategies, however, the answer you think of on your own before you look at the answers provided is likely to correlate more closely to the lectures and readings, and it is therefore more likely to be the correct one. If you are answering a comprehension- or application-based question, it may not be possible to think of the correct answer before looking at the options provided (e.g., if it is a question that starts with “which of the following is the best example of…”, you have to look at the answers to know which is correct), but you can still pause for a moment to consider what you know about the topic before considering each answer.

Be Wary of Tricky or Distracting Words

Questions framed in the negative using words like not often trip students up if they do not take conscious note of them (e.g., Which of the following is not an example of _____?). Also, watch carefully for qualifier words like always, usually, sometimes, often, never, simplest, or fastest. These are clues to you that several answers will be right in certain contexts, but you are being asked to consider the right answer based on the qualifier or condition that has been placed on the question.

Use a Systematic Process of Elimination if Unsure

Uncover each answer one at a time and determine whether you think it is correct, incorrect, or possibly correct. If you are able to write in your exam booklet, it sometimes helps to put a notation beside each answer to indicate which you think it might be (e.g. circle it if you think it is right, cross it out if you think it is wrong, and put a star beside it if you are not sure). If you do not see what you think is the correct answer, but you have identified others as incorrect, this is good news! You will have to make a guess between those you are unsure of, but by eliminating at least one or two answers, you have increased your odds of guessing correctly.

Wear a Watch and Distribute Your Time Appropriately

Not all exam rooms have a functional or correct clock, and you will not be permitted to look at your phone or use a smartwatch, so wear a basic digital or analog watch to your exam. Use the number of questions on the test and the total exam time as a gauge to estimate how much time you have per question. Most of the time, you will have on average about a minute to answer each question, but bear in mind that some questions will be shorter and simpler and will take less time, and others will be more complex and lengthy and will require more time to process. Rather than pacing yourself minute-by-minute or question-by-question, look at your watch every ten or so questions to make sure you are keeping a good pace overall.

Lightly Mark Answers and Move On

This way, you can easily erase your answer later if you come back to the question and change your mind, but if you do not have time to come back to the question, you have still marked down a guess. This also ensures you do not lose your place on your answer sheet and accidentally mess up the rest of your answers in the test!

Mistakes to Avoid When Writing Multiple-choice Exams

Changing Too Many Answers

As mentioned above, most multiple-choice exams have a correct answer, and then there will be another answer that could be correct but is not the best. The more you go back to re-examine your responses, the more likely it is that you will think yourself out of the correct ones by over-analyzing and becoming distracted by these second-best responses.

Marking Up the Answer Key

Most multiple-choice exams are scored by a computer, and if you put pencil marks outside of the intended answer selections or fail to erase an answer completely when you change it, the computer detects “extra lead,” assumes you gave more than one response, and marks the question wrong! If permitted, put extra marks or comments on the actual question booklet or some scrap paper rather than the answer sheet.

Leaving Answers Blank

A blank answer is a throwaway. You are better off guessing than leaving an answer blank because even if you are not sure, there is still a chance you might select the right answer.

Making Completely Random Guesses

To be sure, a random guess is better than no guess at all, but if you do have to guess, try to at least use a systematic process of elimination to narrow your choices down to 2 or 3 potential answers. Start by identifying any answers you know are wrong. Then, when weighing out the remaining answers, consider that the correct answer tends to be the longer or more specific choice, a grammatically correct statement, a value that is not extreme, or an example that is not a special case or exception (unless the question states that you are looking for a special case or exception). Here are some examples:

In the first question, you could immediately eliminate 100% as an answer because it is an extreme value, and it is improbable that 100% of a large and diverse population would agree on anything. Also, legalization would probably never have even been considered by the Canadian government if only 13% of Canadians agreed with it. Thus, you can narrow the answer down to either b or c. When making a guess between those two, b seems more reasonable because most accurate percentages are precise numbers, whereas 80% seems too round a number.

In the second question, a is the only answer that fits grammatically into that blank space, so it would be your most reasonable guess.

Take-Home Essay Exams

A take-home essay exam has the benefit of giving you more time to think about your essay carefully, to look up relevant research and examples, and to organize your ideas. That said, with more time for preparation and writing comes greater expectations, so treat these essay exams like you would a research paper. You will usually be expected to synthesize and analyze information from many sources, including your lectures, readings, and additional research, and chances are good your professor will expect a polished paper. Use the advice presented in Chapter 3 on writing essays to guide your efforts for a take-home essay exam.

In-Class Essay Exams

The pressure is on when you sit down to write an in-class essay, and that can make a lot of students freeze up or draw a blank. If the questions are provided ahead of time, refer to the following tips, plus the tips in the next section that are specific to papers where you are given some time to plan. If you are not given the questions beforehand, though, do not worry—there is still a lot you can do to make sure you stay focused, organized, and on track:

Do a Quick Outline

Outlines are helpful when you sit down to do any type of essay or longer piece of writing, but they are crucial for helping you stay on track when you are under pressure in an exam setting. Your outline does not need to be highly detailed, but it should include your thesis statement (a direct answer to the question that is stated in one or a couple of sentences), a list of the major points you plan to make, and the examples, evidence, or rationale you plan to present to support each point. At this stage, brief notes written on the inside cover of your exam booklet are fine.

Brainstorm and Freewrite

Freewriting is when you just start writing what you know and think about a topic to get your thought processes moving. In an in-class exam, you may find that allocating yourself just a few minutes of freewriting or brainstorming time helps you to get over the initial writers' block that some students experience in these kinds of exam scenarios. When freewriting, you are not worried about how you are organizing or presenting your thoughts, and if it all comes out in one huge run-on sentence, so be it. The caveat here, though, is that you want to put some parameters around your freewriting time so that you do not accidentally get lost in the flow and forget to write an essay, and you also want to make sure your professor is not going to mistake your freewriting for your essay itself. If you have scrap paper, use that instead of your exam booklet, or use the back page of your booklet for your freewriting and draw a line through it when you are done and write something like FREEWRITING: DO NOT MARK at the top.

Brainstorming is another method you can use to help you get your ideas down and draw connections between them. Start by writing what you know about the topic and putting a circle around each of those points. Then, as you think of more things related to each idea, write it down in another circle with a line connecting them. Soon, you will start to be able to see which ideas have multiple points or parts to them, and you will start to also see relationships between major ideas, like cause and effect, emphasis, or contrast. This will help you start to see how your response to the essay question should be organized.

Budget Your Time

Planning time will include the time you take to brainstorm and to create an outline. There is no exact science here, but if you have an hour to write your paper, try to spend no more than about five minutes in the planning stages.

Prioritize the Body of the Paper, Not the Introduction and Conclusion

Lots of students get stuck trying to think of a good first sentence to kick off their paper, but in an exam, your priority is to get your response down, not to work on the next great Canadian novel. If you find yourself hesitating to get that first line down, just move halfway down the page, write your thesis, and get to work on the body paragraphs to support that thesis. You can go back at the end to write a few introductory sentences once the rest of the pieces are in place. If you run out of time to finish your introduction or conclusion, you will likely lose fewer marks than if you spent too much time on these pieces and were not able to fully argue your thesis and answer the question.

Write a Clear Thesis

Write a clear thesis that shows the order in which you will present your ideas in your paper, and make an extra effort to write very clear topic sentences that relate back to that thesis. The reason this is particularly effective in an in-class essay setting is that it helps to keep you on track as you write, and it also helps your instructor to quickly and easily see that you have done what you set out to do. When it comes to marking final exams, most professors are under a serious time crunch to get all of their grades in to the university by a specific date, and they are not going to have the time to comb through your paper closely, so the easier your argument is to follow, the better.

Keep Your Writing Simple and Straightforward

Aim for simpler transitions and signal phrases and a more basic paragraph style: Point, proof, discussion/explanation. When we write research papers at home, we have more time to add some flair or panache to our writing, but in an exam scenario, simpler is  better. Ensure that each paragraph starts with a focused topic sentence that gets right to the point of the paragraph. Then, provide supporting evidence or rationale, and then explain why this evidence or rationale supports the point and why the point supports the thesis or overall argument of the essay. Use strong signal phrases, too, which include transition words or phrases that show the relationship between ideas (e.g. in addition, furthermore, for example, in contrast, however). Also, if you tend to struggle a bit with grammar and punctuation, aim for shorter, simpler sentences instead of longer, complex sentences. You may not win any awards for style, but it is more likely that your professor will be able to understand what you are saying than if you write too many long-winded sentences with lots of errors that inhibit comprehension. Again, the easier you make it for your professor to follow along, the easier it will be for them to give you credit for your ideas.

Leave Space When Writing

Double-space your writing and leave a good amount of margin space to accommodate revisions if you have time for them at the end. Leaving space makes your writing more legible and gives your professor room to make notes, but it also allows you to make larger revisions at the end if you need to, such as crossing out and rewriting sentences or inserting arrows to direct your instructor to a new point you added in the margin.

Polish Your Writing Only if There Is Time Left Over

Proofread closely for grammar, punctuation, and spelling last, and only if there is time. Your professor needs to be able to read and understand your ideas, so it would be misleading to say that mechanics do not matter at all, but your professor is unlikely to be looking for perfection in an in-class paper. Your development and organization of ideas is more important. Students often try to focus on grammar and punctuation too early in the editing process, finding it easier to focus on more tangible errors like comma splices than on harder-to-solve issues like poor argumentation or underdeveloped ideas. Chances are good, though, that your grades will suffer less from a good idea expressed with a few spelling errors than from a perfectly punctuated logical fallacy, so focus on the bigger issues first and worry about the minutiae last.

Tips for When Questions Are Provided Ahead of Time

In-class essays usually are not graded as heavily as take-home exams or term papers for spelling, grammar, punctuation, formatting, and tone, but in the case of essay exams in which the questions are provided ahead of time, it is expected that students will do some preparatory work to ensure that their essay responses are well thought-out, organized, and appropriately supported with examples and evidence. Use the following tips to help you prepare for essay exams when the question options are known:

Determine How Many Questions You Need To Prepare For

It is common for professors to provide a few potential essay questions and to say that you will have a more limited choice for the exam itself. For example, you might get a list of five possible questions, and then when you go into the exam, you will be given a choice of three essay questions. In that case, you will need to prepare for at least three possible essay responses to ensure that at least one of the options given on exam day will be a question you have prepared for.

Prepare an Outline, Not a Full Essay

Time and again, we have seen students who have written their whole essay ahead of time and expect to be able to memorize and reproduce it verbatim in the exam. This is the wrong approach for a couple of reasons. First, most people are not going to be able to remember that much detail for the exam, so it is a waste of energy to focus on memorization instead of understanding. Second, you want to be able to be flexible enough in your response that you can draw on new information you remember as you do other sections of the exam or that come to you under the pressure and excitement of the exam itself. Instead, it is better to write an outline and make sure that what you are prepared for is the process of presenting your answer in a way that is organized, well informed, and persuasive, with lots of examples from your readings, lectures, and research at the ready to support your position.

Think of Specific Examples You Can Use

It can be hard to remember details and specific scenarios when we are in an exam setting, so take some time as you prepare for your in-class essay to find specific supporting examples you can use to help augment or illustrate your ideas.

Draw on Course Lectures, Readings, and Supplemental Material

An in-class essay is a great opportunity to pull together content covered as part of the course, so make sure that you do not forget to review the content broadly. Lecture notes, readings, recommended readings, guest lectures, group activities, and videos or podcasts or other media assigned or referenced in the class are all potential sources of great essay material.

Remember Where Your Content Came From

Some in-class essays are open book, where students can bring in notes or textbooks, which makes it a lot easier to cite sources. Some exams are not open book, though. In those cases, it is common for professors to assume that the information you include comes from your textbook and lectures, but if you do happen to use the unique argument, viewpoint, or findings of a certain scholar or theorist, you will want to be able to signal that in your paper (e.g. “This argument is supported by Chen’s long-range study of this population, which suggested that…”), even if you are not expected to stick to a rigid citation style or reference specific page numbers or publication dates.

In some cases, students have disabilities that require exam accommodations. Most universities will have some sort of disability services office that can answer any questions students or professors may have and that can help coordinate appropriate accommodations. For example, someone with a visual impairment may need to have exam materials transcribed into braille or audio formats and may need to write their exam in a space that allows them to use audio equipment. Or, a student with a learning disability may require a quiet exam room and extra time to write so they can better process the questions without distractions. A temporary impairment, such as a wrist or hand injury, may also require accommodations, such as the use of a scribe or voice-to-text software. Some students may also be eligible for ongoing support from a specialized tutor or learning strategist who can help identify specific study strategies that are best suited to their needs.

It is the university’s responsibility to provide reasonable and appropriate accommodations in cases where students have diagnosed and documented disabilities. In many cases, though, it is the student’s responsibility to provide documentation or proof of a disability if they wish to access accommodations, to follow the appropriate process of requesting accommodations, and to provide the disability services department and their professors adequate time to make the necessary arrangements. There are many students who require accommodations, and some accommodations take considerable time to prepare for, especially if special exam spaces and supervisors need to be schedule, if software needs to be licensed or set up, or if alternate formats need to be prepared. In some cases, getting the necessary proof of a disability requires appointments with health professionals, which can also take time. Therefore, it is extremely important that you contact your professor and your university’s disability services department as early in the semester as possible to get the required paperwork in order. If you do not know what documentation you need, your disability services office should be able to provide you with information. If the semester is already underway and you are faced with a temporary impairment or have only just been diagnosed with a disability that requires accommodation, contact your professor and disability services office as soon as possible after your injury, illness, or diagnosis.

Exam Deferrals

Each university has its own exam deferral policy, but exams are typically deferred only under exceptional circumstances, such as a death in the family or severe illness. You will want to consult with your own university’s policies surrounding exam deferrals as you may need to follow a number of procedures and protocols such as contacting your instructor within 48 hours, obtaining documentation to support the absence, completing official paperwork to apply for a deferred exam, or paying a fee to set up the deferred exam.

Here is some general advice to those who are prone to exam anxiety.

Some Anxiety is Normal and Healthy

Self-Care Helps Our Ability to Cope with Stress

When to See a Counsellor or Psychologist

When we do not understand the context of what we are studying, a few things can happen that get in the way of learning. We may feel disoriented by the wealth of information and have trouble connecting concepts, which makes it harder to remember information or determine why it is relevant. We may also feel as though everything we read or hear is important, and that can lead to information overload, where it becomes difficult to know where we should be spending the bulk of our mental energy, and we risk putting a lot of effort into remembering the wrong things.

The following describes ways to establish context for yourself at the beginning of your course and during each lecture.

The Course Syllabus

It may seem like a no-brainer, but it is important to carefully read through the course syllabus. Your course syllabus is often the only way in which your instructors will communicate their expectations for classroom attendance and behaviour; the learning objectives, purpose, and layout of the course; their office hours and preferred modes of communication; exam dates; and the formatting, due dates, and submission requirements for assignments. As you go through the syllabus and take note of important dates and which textbooks to buy, also make sure you explore the following:

Course Learning Objectives

Pay attention to the language your professor uses to present these objectives. Words like recall, identify, explain, or demonstrate often suggest that you will spend significant amounts of time remembering and learning to apply key terms, concepts, and theories. Words like interpret, consider, evaluate, critique, analyze, or construct often suggest that you will be expected to engage with your course material on a deeper level, by thinking critically about key concepts and offering up your own ideas and analyses that you are able to support with good evidence and rationale. (Most social sciences courses at the university level will involve more critical thinking than memorization and identification, particularly in upper level courses.)

The Number, Type, and Weighting of Assignments

Are your assignments spread out over the term? Do they consist of many short assignments that are each worth a relatively small amount, or are there one or two large assignments that are worth a substantial amount? Often, when grades are distributed across many smaller assignments, such as quizzes or short answer assignments, it means that each of these assignments will focus on specific parts of the course content and that each one will involve some memorization, identification, and application of concepts. When the bulk of the grade is centred around a couple of larger projects, such as one or two major papers, it usually signals that students will be expected to think critically, do additional research, and synthesize information from many sources and lecture topics.

The Type of Midterm and Final Exam

Often, the syllabus will say whether any exams will be short answer, multiple-choice, long answer, or a combination of these, which will affect how you will want to study and prepare for these exams. The syllabus may also tell you if your exams are cumulative or not. Cumulative exams will test your knowledge on all content covered over the semester, whereas non-cumulative exams will test your knowledge of the content covered since the previous exam. See Chapter 2 for additional insights into how to prepare for exams.

Units or Topics Covered in Each Week, Module, or Lecture

Your course syllabus will tell you what readings you need to complete for each class, and it will usually tell you what unit, theme, or module these readings correspond to. It is a good idea to look at these themes and start to think about how the topics are going to work together to paint a bigger picture. It is especially helpful to start by asking yourself what you already know about the subject and then to start to guess what kinds of information will be presented each week or module. Which topics look like they might cover material that is already familiar to you? Which ones look like they might be especially interesting? Which ones look daunting or seem like topics you have never encountered? Getting a sense of what you already know, what you do not yet know, what you are excited to learn, and what you feel less enthusiastic about can help you start to plan ahead for weeks in which the content is likely to be a little easier for you to work through and those in which you can anticipate needing more time and mental effort.

Missing or Unclear Information

If you are not sure of something that is discussed in the syllabus, or if you have questions that are not answered by the syllabus, be sure to ask your professor for clarification.

Before and During Each Lecture

Look ahead at your class schedule and see what has been planned for each lecture. Think about the topic being presented and how it fits in with the larger themes of the course. Also try to anticipate what the lecture will be about given what you know from the previous lectures and from the readings. This will help you connect the information to the bigger picture so that it is easier to remember and think about critically.

During a lecture, you want to frequently check in with yourself to determine the purpose of the information or activity. A common mistake that students make is that they do not pay enough attention to why they are learning something, especially when it comes to special activities or presentations that their professors include in the course from time to time. Professors use these opportunities to test students’ ability to reflect, think critically, and apply knowledge to new scenarios.

For example, suppose your introductory sociology professor asks students to answer a series of questions: What do you typically put on a piece of toast? What kind of pet is best? Your instructor is not actually trying to get the lowdown on what you had for breakfast or whether you prefer cats or dogs. Instead, your professor is likely trying to demonstrate a concept like shared culture by showing how the class produces a limited number of similar responses that reflect the norms of Western culture. This might then lead to a discussion of ethnocentrism, or our tendency to judge other cultures from within our own limited perspective.

Thus, as you are taking lecture notes, think about not just what your instructor is saying or having the students do but also why and how it connects to the rest of the course. Later in this chapter, you can learn more about note-taking and how to format your notes so that they are easy to study from while capturing meaningful content.

There are lots of good resources available online and in bookstores that can assist with the development of active listening skills, but many of them focus on how to listen actively in a conversational setting, typically by having you do things like verbally paraphrase things back to the other person. Lectures do not usually work that way, so while students are often encouraged to engage in discussion, they are also expected to spend long periods of time just watching and listening, which can make some of those strategies hard to apply. So, to help yourself listen and take better class notes, try the following tips:

Stick to a Routine

Sit Where You Can Pay Attention Best

Get Your Required Readings Done Before Class

Review Lecture Slides

Pay Attention to Examples

Leave Lots of Space to Fill in Notes After Class

Review Notes as Quickly After Class as Possible

Leave Lots of Space in the Margins

Try Integrating Symbols into Your Notes

Asking Questions and Engaging in Class Discussion

Generally, it is expected in the social sciences that students will be active in class discussions, and students are encouraged to speak up and ask questions or add to the discussion. That is because in the social sciences, we rarely encounter situations with clear “right” or “wrong” answers. Instead, we start by learning the foundational concepts of a discipline, and then as we move on to more complex questions and issues, the answers become more subject to interpretation, and it is the quality of our critical thinking that we seek to refine. For example, in an introductory sociology course, your professor might tell you that a specific situation is an example of a certain concept. In a higher-level sociology course, however, the questions will become yours to explore: Based on your research and critical reasoning, what do you think is going on in a certain scenario, event, or practice? Or, how can you demonstrate your understanding of this concept using a real-life example?

We often develop these critical reasoning skills best by expressing and exploring ideas with others, which is why class discussion is so important. Class discussion allows us to get feedback from others about the soundness of our own ideas, and it allows us to see complex issues from many different perspectives, thereby enriching our understanding and capacity to explore the topic further for a research paper or other assignment.

Put your fears aside and do your best to get in there and join in the conversation! If you feel anxious about doing so, consider visiting your professor during office hours to start talking one-on-one and developing some confidence in your understanding of the material. Or, try finding just one or two people in the class you are comfortable forming a study group with, and start discussing the material with them. You will still get the benefit of learning by participating, and odds are good that you will soon start to feel more comfortable voicing your thoughts in the larger group.

To recall specific types of information on an exam, such as the names and definitions of key theories or concepts, significant dates, or important people and events, we work to transfer that information from our short-term memories into our long-term memories, plus we have to get used to recalling that information when we need it.

Our long-term memories store information best when it is meaningful to us, when we can recognize why it is important, when we have encountered the information many times, and when we can link it to other information that we know. For these reasons, the reading and notetaking methods discussed in this chapter focus so heavily on establishing context, reviewing information regularly, and drawing connections to other information.

Recall strategies help us learn to retrieve information on demand. Have you ever been in an exam and you know that you know an answer to a question, but it does not pop into your head until long after you have left the exam, maybe when you are doing dishes or brushing your teeth that evening? You might think there is something wrong with your memory, but in fact, the information was there all along. The problem is being able to recall it in the moment that you require it. The following strategies can help:

Cover Your text or Notes and Review Margin Notes

Make Flashcards

Create Fill-in-the-Blank Charts or Diagrams

Practice Elaborative Rehearsal

Concept Mapping

Concept mapping is especially helpful for developing an understanding of how large or complex pieces of information fit together. Historical timelines are a good example of concept mapping that can help us easily see the sequence of key events, but these are not just useful in history courses. They can also be applied in sociology, political science, psychology, English, or other courses to help link key concepts and to see how different people and events influenced each other or how several theoretical perspectives and developments came out of one main perspective (as an example, see Figure 1).

Study Buddies or Study Groups

Discussing information with others is a highly effective way of remembering it and of deepening our understanding of a topic. When we have a conversation about something, we are often given lots of other memorable information to attach to it. Someone will tell a story, or they will share their own methods of remembering that information, or they will talk about how it relates to something they have learned in another class. These forms of sharing ideas aid in the recall of information because they provide additional meaning and context for us to latch onto. They also allow us to practice sharing our interpretation of course material while getting feedback from others who might let us know when we have really explained something well or if we are maybe a little off track.

The trick with study groups is that you want to make sure that everyone is participating, and you need to form a group with trusted peers who you know are going to stay on track. If only one person is doing all the talking and everyone else is listening, that one person is getting most of the benefit because they are the ones paraphrasing and teaching the information to everyone else.

If you do not have any peers you feel comfortable studying with, that is okay too. It is still beneficial to try to discuss and explain concepts with others, even if they are not in the course, or to your dog, cat, or goldfish, or even just to yourself. One of the authors prepared for most of her undergraduate essays and exams by going for long walks to think about how she would explain her ideas to someone else.

Using Supplemental Information

Supplemental information is information that may not be part of your assigned readings but that can be used to help you better remember, understand, or apply key concepts. Here are some examples of supplemental information you might use.

Websites Accompanying Textbooks

Case Studies or Examples

Recommended Readings

Additional Web Resources

• Khan Academy (https://www.khanacademy.org)
• MIT Open Courseware (https://ocw.mit.edu)
• Open Yale Courses (https://oyc.yale.edu)

Your Professor’s Office Hours

Writing Centres

Libraries

Other Campus Resources

Most research assignments expect students to provide information from scholarly, academic sources including books and journal articles. Depending on the assignment, you may also find other sources like conference papers, theses, news sources, and government reports helpful. The following section describes each type of source and when each may or may not be helpful.

Journal Articles

When a researcher is ready to share the results of their research, they typically write it up in a research paper not unlike the papers you are asked to write in class and submit it to a journal. The journal then sends the paper to experts in the same field as that researcher. These experts read it critically, often without knowledge of who wrote the paper to avoid bias and provide feedback that is then shared with the researcher. Sometimes the journal will decide to immediately reject or accept the article based on this feedback. More often, however, the researcher is asked to make revisions based on the feedback they have received and resubmit the paper for publication. This process is known as peer-review, or refereeing, and can take several months. Once published, these articles become part of a quality-controlled, specialized body of literature on a given topic that other experts can engage with, build upon, and cite in their own work. This is largely why students are encouraged to use these works above all others in their own papers to inform their own analyses.

Books

Books can take a long time to write and publish so they are not always the best source of current information. That said, books (including eBooks) published by academic presses are wonderful sources of in-depth information. They are especially useful if you need to research a specific theory, research methodology, or a complete history or broad overview of a given topic, school of thought, or significant scholar in your discipline.

Encyclopedias/Dictionaries*

If you are new to a topic, theory, or research method, encyclopedias and dictionaries are a useful source for doing “pre-research.” Academic libraries provide access to encyclopedias and dictionaries that have been written by experts around specific subjects, including research methods, social theories, gender issues, and so on. While not something you would typically cite in a research paper, these sources can play a major role in helping to orient you to whatever topic you are researching and writing on. They also often cite books and peer-reviewed articles that you may find useful.

Theses/Dissertations*

Most universities host repositories of theses that are freely available online. These lengthy research reports completed by students at the end of undergraduate honours, master and doctoral degrees are rich sources of information, however, they are also considered the work of experts-in-training and are not technically peer-reviewed. If you have an assignment that requires that you only use peer-reviewed sources and come across a thesis that is relevant, ask your instructor if it is OK to use it in your paper and make sure to carefully evaluate the information it provides for accuracy and reliability. Also, as with encyclopedias, look at the sources that the authors have cited. This can lead you to relevant sources that are peer-reviewed and may be more suitable for inclusion in your paper.

Conference Papers*

Researchers frequently take their work on the road, writing up preliminary results from their research and sharing it in person with colleagues to solicit feedback before formally reporting it in an academic journal or book. Conference organizers often share these findings openly online and through research databases ensuring that research results are shared widely long before this work becomes formally published. These works are also great places to discover additional, peer-reviewed sources on your topic by exploring cited sources, however, they are not themselves completed, peer-reviewed research reports and may not be the most reliable sources of information to cite in your own work.

Newspapers*

These can be great sources of information on current events. For example, if you are writing a paper on social movements and you want to include information on recent events to give some context to your work, a newspaper will provide you with facts and figures such as dates of protests, and how many people were in attendance. News sources usually do not cite sources or provide in depth information on a topic, however, nor are they written by an expert in that area or reviewed by experts before publication, so it is recommended that you only use news sources sparingly and where appropriate to give context to a topic.

Credible Information on Websites*

The most important consideration regarding the use of free content available through search engines like Google for class assignments concerns the wide range of questionable content lacking expertise and objective analysis available on the web. At the same time, some useful information that can add context to your work and evidence supporting your arguments is only available freely online, including research produced by not-for-profit organizations, professional associations, and governments. For instance, government agencies frequently release statistical data and reports that contain original research compiled by experts that are rich sources of information and analysis on public policy and legislation. Such sources are not peer-reviewed, however, and can often reflect the ideological biases of the organizations producing them so they are not necessarily the best sources of unbiased, academic information and should be read and interpreted with a critical eye.

Where to Search

Libraries pay a lot of money for access to academic articles and books that librarians carefully select to meet the needs of students and faculty researchers. If you were to try accessing this information using Google you would run into two major problems. First, you would have to sort through a lot of non-scholarly and often misleading, misinformed, commercial, and biased information since anyone can put information up on the Internet. Second, when you did find a scholarly article or book, you would in many cases be required to purchase a copy. To avoid this, always start your research from your institution’s library website. If working from home, you should still have access to all digital resources linked from the library’s website; you will just be asked to log in to view them.

Academic library websites usually provide the following options for locating sources. Each can be helpful depending on your specific needs:

Library Catalogues (or Discovery Services)

This is the main search box located on the library’s homepage where you can search for sources by keyword, title, author, or subject. Some libraries only provide access to books using this search box, however, increasingly, libraries have expanded these search engines to provide access to nearly everything the library has access to, including books, articles, conference papers, theses, music albums, and DVDs. This is called a discovery service, and can be especially helpful if you:

• want to find practically everything that has been written on a topic,
• you are researching a very specific topic that has not been widely researched and want to search across all time periods, disciplines, and types of content to explore what might be out there, or
•  you are looking for a specific book or article; searching here for its title will in most cases immediately reveal if the library has access to it or not.

Databases

Somewhere on the library website, you should find a link to databases that the library subscribes to. Whereas a discovery service will search across content in multiple databases, each database on its own contains select content that is focused around a specific subject area (e.g., economics, political science, health), and type of resource (e.g., scholarly articles, news articles, data sets). Since most research topics in the social sciences are also studied in other disciplines using different approaches, it is recommended that you start your research using databases devoted to the social sciences to find relevant sources. A search for abortion in a discovery service, for instance, can lead to thousands of academic articles dealing with legal and medical considerations, historic perspectives, and even as it relates to other species. The same search in a social science database like SocINDEX or Sociological Abstracts leads to only a small fraction of those articles, each written by an expert in the social sciences and dealing more specifically with social, cultural, economic, and psychological aspects of abortion among human populations.

Perhaps you have a great article that sets the foundation for your paper. In addition to looking through the works it references, one of the best options for identifying additional relevant articles is to determine whether other researchers have expanded on this work since it was published. In certain databases, sometimes referred to as citation indexes, you can search for a specific article by title, and it will provide you with a list of later works that have cited this original source. Common citation indexes found in library’s lists of databases include:

• Web of Science
• Scopus
• Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.ca), which is also freely available to search online, though you will need to either use it on campus or go into its settings to configure it to provide access to subscription content available through your library

Journals

While each of the above resources allow you to search multiple journals at the same time, you can also go through the library website to access a specific journal and only search through articles it has published. This is useful if you want to see what is being published in a specific research area in, for instance, a journal that specializes in research on qualitative methods, or Marxist theory, or crime in Canada, and so on.

Search Strategies

Before you start searching, make sure you are familiar with the following search strategies that work in most if not all advanced search options in library catalogues, discovery services, databases, and individual journals. Here are some of the most common, useful strategies that work well when doing an advanced search:

AND

Use an “AND” between different keywords and concepts to find all of those terms in each work that comes up in your search results:

OR

Use an “OR” between synonyms (terms with similar meanings) to find any of those words in your results:

“Quotation marks”

Put quotation marks around multi-word phrases to find those exact phrases in your results. This is also useful if you want to find specific articles or books by their exact title:

Asterisk (*)

Adding an asterisk towards the end of a word will find any possible truncation that may appear on that word in your search results:

Search String Example

Combining these strategies, an effective database search might look like this:

Once you have done a search, make sure to use the limiters and facets typically located to the left of search results to refine your results by source type (e.g., academic journals; books; eBooks; news). Many databases also have a “peer-review” limiter that you can select, however, as noted above, remember that this will not filter out short editorials and book reviews that may also be published by a journal alongside peer-reviewed research papers. To find the latest research on a topic in the social sciences, try limiting the publication date to the most recent five to ten years, recognizing that research takes time to get published and it may not be possible to find more recent sources on a topic.

Accessing Sources

Physical Copies

If your search results turn up a physical resource you would like to access, such as a book, the record for that item will tell you where it is located and whether it is on the shelf, located at a different library, or currently signed out. If it is not available, look for an option to place a “hold” or an inter-library loan request on the item; you will be notified when it is available for you to pick up at the library.

Items on the shelf at most academic libraries are organized in accordance with the Library of Congress Classification system. As part of this system, each book is assigned a specific alphanumeric code called a call number. Books are organized in alphabetical order and by subject area based on these codes. When you find a book that you want in your search results, write down the call number provided in the record for that book and then find the section in the library where it lives based on the first letter (or letters) of the call number. For example, the B section is where you will find books in Philosophy, Psychology, and Religion, H is Social Sciences, R denotes Medicine, and so on. If you take a book off the shelf but decide you do not want to sign it out, let the library staff re-shelve it. This is not an inconvenience, and it ensures that all library users will find books in their respective locations, as indicated by call numbers.

Online Access

To access articles and other electronic sources in your search results, look for an access link in the item’s record (e.g., “PDF” or “Read Online”). You can then usually email the item record to yourself to access it later, print it out, or download and save a copy to a USB memory stick or computer. If it is not available, look for an inter-library loan option to request a copy from another library. You will be notified when it is available, either in your inbox or for pickup at the library.

WHO Is the Author?

WHAT Type of Source Is It?

WHERE Was It Published?

WHEN Was It Published?

WHY Was It Published?

Know Where to Get Help

Practice Using the Library

Develop Lists of Keywords

Evaluate Your Sources

Track Your Sources and Cite Them Correctly

Research can involve searching through hundreds of sources to find the most relevant and appropriate to your topic. It is therefore important to have a plan for keeping track of where you have looked, keywords you have used, and what you have found. Programs like Evernote (https://evernote.com), Google Drive (https://www.google.com/drive), and Dropbox (https://www.dropbox.com) are especially helpful in this regard since you can store and access your notes, as well as PDF copies of articles, from multiple devices. Most library databases and catalogues also have an option where you can email sources to yourself so that you can easily access them later in your inbox.

If you are working on a major research project such as an honours thesis you may want to try a citation management program like Zotero (https://www.zotero.org), Mendeley (https://www.mendeley.com), or RefWorks (https://www.refworks.com). These products can help you collect, manage, and cite a large number of sources. Zotero and Mendeley offer free basic accounts, while some libraries provide their users with access to RefWorks at no additional cost.

Learn From Your Mistakes

In accordance with the 7th edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (2020), whenever you refer to information or data produced by someone else in a paper, you need to cite the original source in the text of your paper and in a reference list at the end so that the reader can follow up and learn more, while also giving credit to the author and avoiding accusations of plagiarism.

Paraphrasing

When you write information from someone else’s work out in your own words, also known as paraphrasing, the APA style requires that you cite the last name of the author followed by the year of publication within parentheses:

Or at the end of the information you have paraphrased within parentheses:

Direct Quotes

If you quote information exactly as it appears in a source that you are using, make sure to also include quotation marks and a page number:

Or…

Works With No Page Numbers

Quoting Research Participants

Formatting Your Reference List

The reference list should start on its own page at the end of your paper (but prior to any tables, figures, or appendices) with a centred title in bold at the top that reads "References."

The list of references should be double-spaced (along with the rest of your paper) and arranged in alphabetical order by authors' last names.

Author Information

Works with a single author

List the author’s last name, followed by the first and middle initials of other given names that appear on the work:

Lunny, A. M. (2017). Debating hate crime: Language, legislatures, and the law in Canada. UBC Press.

2 to 20 authors

List the authors in the order in which they appear on the work. For each person, include the author’s last name, followed by the first and middle initials of other names given, separated by a comma, and an “&” symbol before the last author:

Livingstone, D. W., Pollock, K., & Raykov, M. (2014). Family binds and glass ceilings: Women managers’ promotion limits in a ‘knowledge economy.’ Critical Sociology, 42(1), 145-166. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920514532663

21 or more authors

List the first nineteen authors, followed by an ellipsis, then the last author:

Schrijver, L. H., Olsson, H., Phillips, K. A., Terry, M. B., Goldgar, D. E., Kast, K., Engel, C., Mooij, T. M., Adlard, J., Barrowdale, D., Davidson, R., Eeles, R., Ellis, S., Evans, D. G., Frost, D., Izatt, L., Porteous, M. E., Side, L. E., Walker, L., . . . Rookus, M. A. (2018). Oral contraceptive use and breast cancer risk: Retrospective and prospective analyses from a BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutation carrier cohort study.  JNCI Cancer Spectrum, 2(2), Article pky023. https://doi.org/10.1093/jncics/pky023

Multiple works by the same author

In cases where you refer to multiple works by the same author, list the references by date, beginning with the earliest work. If works were published in the same year, add a letter to the year starting with “a” (this same letter should also appear in your in-text citation when referencing that work):

Date of Publication

When citing articles and books, you only need to include the year of publication in brackets following author information.

For information from websites, newspapers, social media or magazines include (year, month, day), if provided in the source:

Hughes, G. (2017, December 20). Montreal suspends pit bull ban, plans consultations. The Globe and Mail. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/montreal-suspends-pit-bull-ban-plans-consulations/article37393139/

If no date is given, include the following in place of a date: (n.d.):

Canadian Association of Research Libraries. (n.d.). Repositories in Canada. http://www.carl-abrc.ca/advancing-research/institutional-repositories/repos-in-canada

Titles of Works

Only capitalize the first word of titles, the first word of any sub-titles that follow a colon, and any proper nouns appearing in the title:

Sunga, S. (2017). Dealing with oppression: Indigenous relations with the state in Canada.
Ethics & Social Welfare, 11(2), 135-148. https://doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2017.1293118

Format Descriptions

As detailed below, APA citations each follow the same general pattern: Author, Date, Title, Location. The exact format, however, can differ slightly depending on the form of authorship (e.g., authors or editors), the type of source (e.g., book, article, website), and how the source was obtained (e.g., online or as a physical copy).

Books

The 7th edition of the APA publication manual (American Psychological Association, 2020) no longer requires including a place of publication. Simply include the name of the publisher at the end of a citation following the title:

Editions of Books

If the book has been reprinted as a new edition, the title should be followed by parentheses containing the relevant edition number:

Edited Books

Book Chapters

First list the chapter author(s), year of publication, and the chapter title. Continue with book editor(s), the book’s title--in italics, edition (if applicable), and pages that the chapter spans preceded by “pp.” indicating the page range; a single page would have just “p.”. Note that the editor(s)’ given name(s)’ initials come before the last name, preceded by the word “In” and followed by “(Ed.)” or “(Eds.)”:

eBooks

If a book read online has a DOI (Digital Object Identifier), include it presented as a link following the title and publisher:

Journal Articles

Following the article title, list the journal title and volume number in italics, then include the issue number in parentheses, followed by the page numbers associated with the article. If the work was found online, including through a database, include a DOI for the work if provided--this can typically be found on the article’s first page:

If the article does not have a DOI, including physical copies and articles from library databases, no further information should be included following the page number range:

Conference Papers

Include the date the work was presented, including the month and day, if available (you may need to search Google for this), as well as the name of the conference and its location:

If the conference paper was formally published, be sure to include either the DOI, if provided, or a link to the paper, at the end of the citation:

Magazine Articles

These references follow the same format as journal articles. Include a year, month(s) and day, if provided by the original source:

News Articles

Online news articles follow a similar format to other types of periodicals. Again, include a year, month(s) and day, if provided:

If the author of an article is unknown, start with the title followed by the date:

When using a news article from a physical copy of a newspaper, include the section and page number as indicated:

Websites

When citing information from a web page, you generally only need to include the author, date last updated or modified, title of the page, and retrieval link. If no author is given, include the association, company, or organization as the author:

For government reports, include a catalogue or report number in parentheses, if given:

Social Media

If citing from social media, include the name of the account owner and exact date. In square brackets, include the account’s username, and form description as shown:

Videos and Television

Like most website content, audiovisual materials are usually not considered scholarly, but may be used in your paper as illustrative examples or data, and still need to be cited if referenced.

If citing a film, list the director as author as shown. Citing online copies of videos requires that you include a retrieval link:

If citing a specific episode from a TV or documentary series, include the writers and director as authors, and executive producers following the title of the episode, and then the series title as shown. If the episode is on a website that requires users to login, include only a link to the homepage:

Music

When citing from song lyrics, the recording artist(s) should be listed as the author(s):

• The 7th edition of the  Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (2020), carried by most academic libraries.
• APA Style Blog (https://apastyle.apa.org/blog).
• Librarians and writing centre staff at universities are happy to help if you have questions. Many also provide their own help resources online for APA and various other citation styles.
• Many research databases provide computer-generated citations for works. These are a great starting place. Make sure to compare the examples provided to the actual APA formatting guidelines, however, since these reference entries often contain errors.

Reference Management Software

There are several software products available that can help you collect, manage, and cite sources.

These programs typically interact well with research databases, websites, and word processing software such as Microsoft Word, allowing you to insert references “on the fly.” They can also automatically generate a list of references for you at the end of your paper, using the style you select (such as APA). These products include:

• EndNote (https://endnote.com);
• Mendeley (https://www.mendeley.com);
• RefWorks (https://www.refworks.com); and
• Zotero (https://www.zotero.org).

Some academic libraries provide users with access to RefWorks, while anyone can sign up for a basic account with Mendeley or Zotero with limited storage capacity.

As an undergraduate student with assignments requiring that you only cite a limited number of sources in each paper, you may find this type of software to be too cumbersome to learn. However, if you are writing a substantial honours project paper, or beginning a graduate-level degree, we encourage you to explore these options. There are numerous online tutorials to help you learn these products, and most academic libraries have staff that can teach you the basics.

APA Checklist

Formatting Your Paper

Formatting Your References

Most student essays present a thesis statement at the end of an introduction, followed with a series of arguments to support that thesis in the body of the paper, which are backed up with secondary research, and a conclusion. However, the structure of an essay varies depending on disciplinary conventions as well as specific assignment requirements that your instructor may ask for, so if you do not know what your professor wants, be sure to ask.

Formatting Your Paper

Title Page

Text of Your Paper

References

Introduction and Thesis Statement

The purpose of an introduction is to situate your paper within its context and establish the direction for the rest of your paper. After reading your introduction, your reader should understand what specific angle of the topic you will be exploring, why it is important or what problem you are trying to address, what kind of essay you have written or what kind of research you have done, and what your overarching conclusion or argument is (also known as your thesis).

Your thesis statement is normally found at the end of your introduction, and it presents the main argument for your paper. This sounds simple, but many writers find thesis statements to be difficult to construct. There is not one way to write a thesis statement, but the following tips and examples may help.

Clearly State and Explain the Position or Argument

Thesis statements can be quite simple and straightforward, stating a position and listing a couple of reasons for it:

They can also be more complex:

In both examples above, the author’s position is clearly stated, and the reader has a sense of how the essay will unfold from there.

Also note that these thesis statements are arguable. They are not just a statement of fact (e.g., many public schools are proposing vaccination policies to prevent outbreaks of preventable diseases), nor are they just a statement of opinion, assumption, or generalization (e.g., schools that implement vaccination policies do not care about individual rights).

Thesis Statements Can be Lengthy-ish

In many cases, one sentence may be all that is needed, but contrary to popular belief, there is no rule stating that a thesis statement must be one sentence. In fact, for heftier projects like a dissertation, honours- or masters-level thesis, the thesis statement may be presented over a whole chapter!

That said, for most undergraduate-level work, one or a few sentences, or possibly a brief paragraph will be plenty of room for a well-developed thesis statement. If you find it difficult to summarize your argument and rationale, you are likely including too much detail and not being specific enough about what your core argument really is, or you are trying to cover too many things in a single paper. 

Thesis Statements Can Change and Evolve 

Until you are ready to submit your final draft, you should consider whatever thesis statement you have written down as a working thesis, subject to change, and you should always revisit your thesis after you feel the rest of your paper is finished to make any last-minute edits to it that may be needed.

Though we often think of writing as the process of communicating pre-formed ideas, it is a thought process in and of itself. As you write, it is perfectly natural to also be thinking through your points, coming up with new ideas you had not thought of previously, or considering your research in a new light. You may also hit points in the drafting process where you realize that you need to go back and do some additional research or that there is a better source for you to use than the one you had planned on using. The point is that writing is non-linear, which means we continuously move back and forth between the research, thinking, writing, and revising processes rather than doing each one after the other. This means that by the time you are done writing, it is entirely possible that you might have to change the order in which your thesis presents your rationale, or that your argument may have shifted entirely, and that is totally normal!

Body

The body of your paper is where you expand upon and fully flesh out the rationale for your position or argument. Each paragraph focuses on one idea, with the usual paragraph structure following a point, proof, discussion format.

In high school, students become familiar with the basic five-paragraph essay structure that includes an introduction with a thesis statement, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. As your writing assignments grow in length and complexity in university, so will the number of paragraphs you will write in your essays. Your introduction or conclusion may be longer than a single paragraph each, and chances are good that you will have more than three points to make in your papers, or you may require several paragraphs to fully explain one point that you are making. With length and complexity of writing, transitions become especially important.

Transitions help your reader understand how one paragraph feeds into another and how one sentence moves into another. In a five-paragraph essay, using transitions can be as simple as starting each topic sentence with First …, Second …, and Third or Finally …. However, unless you really are presenting an itemized or sequential list of some sort, these transitions are not very precise, and they do little to help the reader understand the relationship between your ideas.

When you write your topic sentences, use transitions to make it clear if the next paragraph presents a new idea entirely (Another way in which vaccination policies are used is . . . ), if it is adding to the argument addressed in the previous paragraph (The lack of alternatives becomes even more problematic when one considers that . . . ), or if it is presenting an opposing view (The implementation of such policies is justified by . . . ) or disputing it (What this justification fails to take into account, however, is . . . ).

Conclusion

Generally, your conclusion will revisit your thesis and summarize the main arguments you have made to support your thesis. Conclusions are also often used to identify areas for further research or to reflect on the significance of the topic. That said, your conclusion should usually be quite brief, and you should avoid introducing new information here. It is mostly just there to signal to your reader that you are wrapping things up and pulling everything back together again after expanding on your ideas in the body of the paper.

Essay Checklist

Sometimes, your professors will give you a topic that you must write about, but more likely than not, you will be given a choice of many topics to write on, or you may be asked to formulate a topic all on your own. Whether you are given a topic or are coming up with your own, however, one of the most commonly encountered challenges students face is how to narrow and focus the topic into something that is manageable. If your topic is too narrow or niche, you may have difficulty finding information about it. If it is too broad, you will find yourself overwhelmed with information and may find it hard to figure out how to pull it all together into a cohesive paper.

There is no one way to select and narrow a topic, but here are some tips to help you along the way:

Pick Something You Are Interested In

Talk It Out

Draw a Mind Map of What You Already Know

Do Some Preliminary Research 

Creating a Working Thesis

A working thesis is an answer to your research question that you use as a launching point to guide your research. This thesis will likely change as you complete your research and draft your essay, but it will at least keep you focused and grounded with a sense of direction.

For the sample topic above about digital divide and poverty, a perfectly reasonable working thesis might be something like, “There are many ways in which digital divide affects urban and rural populations differently” or “To reduce both digital divide and poverty, government policies must address both issues instead of assuming that solving one issue will take care of the other” or “Digital divide among younger populations is more likely to be correlated with poverty than digital divide among older populations.”

Exploring Ideas

This is where you want to give yourself room for creativity. While you explore sources that look like they will support what you are trying to say, also challenge yourself to look at sources that look like they might say the opposite or something else entirely. Spend time sitting with and thinking about your research and what the significance of it is. See if there are common themes that come up in your readings that might point to well-established knowledge (or frequently referenced challenges and unknowns). Also, look at the citations and bibliographies that the authors of your books and articles have included to find some sources to expand your research.

Prewriting

Prewriting is the process of planning your paper and organizing your ideas. Often, prewriting takes shape as an outline, where you write your main thesis or argument at the top of the page and then write down your main arguments in point form:

Other ways you might do prewriting is by drawing mind maps that visually connect your ideas, by colour-coding your research notes (e.g., all notes highlighted in pink correspond to argument 1, all notes highlighted in blue correspond to argument 2, etc.), using sticky notes on a wall or desktop to move ideas around into different sequences, or by just quickly sketching out a couple of ideas on some scrap paper. The point of prewriting is to help you figure out the general layout and order of your ideas in your paper so that when you sit down to write, you have a good sense of where to begin and where to go from there.

Drafting

We are reluctant to say that there is a “best” way to do any sort of writing because every writer comes to develop their own process that works best for them, but, in general, try to not overthink your first draft of an essay. Most of the time, it is the revising, editing, and proofreading processes that will take up more of your time, and your first draft is just a kick at the can to get you going.

If you are finding yourself daunted or overwhelmed at the big paper-writing task ahead of you, just dive in and write without paying too much attention to things like flow, grammar, punctuation, and spelling. The first thing you write will not be what you are handing in, but you need to get something on the page before you can work on improving it. At this stage, all you should really be worried about is putting your research and ideas into complete sentences and paragraphs.

Revising

Believe it or not, revising, editing, and proofreading are all separate processes. Revising is the big-picture stage, where you take a step back and reflect on the overall paper. Ask yourself:

• Do I feel like these arguments have fully supported my thesis?
• Are there any sections that still feel incomplete or underdeveloped?
• Have I made any unsupported generalizations or assumptions that require more evidence?
• Is everything presented in a logical order, or should I move some things around?
• Is my paper too long? Too short?

The key here is to focus on the big picture without getting bogged down by the details just yet. This is a good time to make structural changes to your paper where you move arguments around or perhaps decide that you need to do some additional research to fill in some of the remaining gaps.

Editing

Editing is where we might make some more decisions about style, tone, and flow. After you have revised your paper, read it again and ask yourself these questions:

• Does each paragraph have a topic sentence?
• Have I adequately explained my arguments and evidence?
• Have I cited all quotations AND paraphrases?
• Is the connection between my ideas clear?
• How well does my paper flow? Is the tone academic?
• Do I have a lot of unnecessary sentences or words?

Often, it is helpful at this stage to read your paper out loud to yourself. Other strategies include getting a text-to-voice program to read your paper aloud to you, or to get a friend or peer to read it to you exactly as it is written so that you can hear what it sounds like. It can even help to change the font and print it out so that it looks and feels different as you read. The point is to do what you can to get out of the same head space and viewpoint you used to draft and revise the paper because by this point, you have been looking at your own writing long enough that you are likely to miss a lot of things you would otherwise notice if you were looking at things through fresh eyes (or ears!).

Proofreading

This is where you can finally start fine-tuning your writing by poring over your essay for grammar and punctuation errors, spelling mistakes, better word choices, etc.

Writers do not move through these processes quite so methodically, and it is perfectly normal to find yourself doing some last-minute research and revising even if you have already proofread your paper once or twice. However, if you can manage to not sweat the small stuff until the very end, you are likely to use your time more efficiently because whenever you make larger changes, you are probably going to have to go back and proofread all over again, thereby increasing your work.

Like editing, proofreading is something that gets harder the longer you have been looking at something. If you have used any of the techniques suggested above for editing, it is almost certain that you have already done some proofreading too because you will have noticed certain grammatical mistakes or awkward sentences when you saw them in a new light.

For your final proofread, try taking things one step further and reading your paper from the end to the beginning. Start by reading the last sentence, then the second last sentence, then the third last sentence, and so on. When we read this way, we take our sentences out of context, which is important when we are reading for grammar and punctuation. If you are always reading beginning to end, you are likely to miss mistakes because you know what you mean to say, so that is what your mind sees. Reading from end to beginning disrupts this flow and makes us better able to see what is really on the page.

Using Quotes

When you quote a source, you must indicate that you are taking an author’s exact words by using quotation marks (“__”):

Quotations are helpful in many situations, such as when an author has said something so well that including their exact words would add insightful emphasis to your point, or when you are using the exact words that a research subject shared in a study you or someone else has conducted. However, many students rely too heavily on quotations in their papers, which can disrupt the flow of their writing because their paper starts to look like a big mashup of soundbites from different authors.

Another rookie mistake is assuming that quotations are self-explanatory, when in fact, they usually require some explanation so that the reader understands the context of the quotation and how it connects to the argument. See how in the following example, the quotation is contextualized and explained by the sentences before and after it:

Another mistake some students make is that they use quotations that, when taken by themselves, do not accurately represent what the author intended. A classic case of this would be when an author makes a statement, which a student uses as evidence in their paper, but in the actual article, that statement was followed by a big BUT or another key piece of information that changes the context of the remark.

Before using quotations in your paper, ask yourself:

• Is this quotation taken and used in the proper context?
• Is the author’s wording important?
• Can the passage be summarized instead?
• Will the quotation require further explanation?
• Is the connection to my argument clear?

Paraphrasing

Patchwriting

Where many students go wrong in paraphrasing is when they simply change a few words but essentially use the same sentence as the original source did but with a few synonyms thrown in. That is sometimes referred to as patchwriting, and it can be an academic integrity issue. For example:

In the example above, the second passage may look slightly different than the original, but it follows the same sentence structure and syntax as the original, and words and phrases have simply been replaced with very similar words and phrases. Properly paraphrased, this passage would look more like this:

 When paraphrasing, focus on paraphrasing ideas, not sentences, and try following these steps:

• Avoid paraphrasing individual sentences as much as possible, as these are harder to paraphrase without using very similar wording to the original. Instead, try paraphrasing an entire paragraph, passage, or argument.
• Read the passage a few times until you are sure you understand what the author is saying.
• Without looking at the original passage, jot down the main points you want to highlight, using your own words.
• Draft a paraphrase from your notes.
• Compare with the original to ensure you have properly paraphrased and change any portions that look like patchwriting.

Remember, paraphrasing is a skill that takes time to develop, so keep trying. Also, remember to cite your quotations and your paraphrases.

In principle, academic integrity is the ability and willingness to act ethically as a scholar. Each university has its own academic integrity policy that will state the behaviours that constitute an academic integrity policy violation (e.g., cheating, plagiarism, or improper collaboration) and that will explain what the potential consequences of violating the policy are (e.g., a grade of 0 on the assignment, an F in the course, or expulsion from the university). Students are usually expected to be proactive in familiarizing themselves with their institution’s policy, so they should not wait for someone else to explain the policy to them.

When it comes to writing papers, plagiarism and unfair representation are the primary forms of academic integrity violations that can occur. In essays, academic integrity means that:

• You have researched and written the essay yourself.  
• You have included a references page or bibliography listing all the sources you have used.
• You have clearly indicated when you have directly quoted from a source (using quotation marks) and when you have modified a quotation (using square brackets to indicate that you have changed or added something, and ellipses to indicate that you have omitted something).
• You have cited all direct quotations and paraphrases from your research sources (remember, even if you have put an author’s ideas into your own words, you must still cite the source of that information).
• You have not fabricated information or used an author’s ideas out of context.

The reason it is so important to act with integrity as a writer is that as previously mentioned, scholarly writing is a conversation. Scholars research, write, and publish to facilitate academic dialog. If you are not citing your sources appropriately and presenting information truthfully and in good faith, you are not giving other scholars credit for their work, you are not giving your reader an opportunity to fairly evaluate your argument and judge for themselves if they agree or disagree, and you are not allowing others to expand upon your research or to respond to your argument. In other words, you have not written a piece that serves its scholarly function.

The title page is an identification source for your work and it includes your name, your student ID number, the course name for which the proposal is assigned (or the instructor’s name that the proposal will be turned in to), and the date the proposal is due. These items are usually located near the bottom of the title page, preferably on the right-hand side. If you refer to the “Home” tab in a word document, in the “Paragraph” section, you can “Align Left” and then highlight the text and click the tab key on your keyboard so that this section occupies the bottom right-hand corner of the page.

Title Page Checklist

❏ Separate title page, numbered

❏ Working title, centered, starting about half-way down the page

❏ Several blank lines

❏ Near the bottom of the page in the right-hand corner

• Author’s name
• Student Identification number
• Course name and/or instructor’s name
• Date

As a graduate student you may be eligible for funding towards your post-secondary research. One of the leading funding agencies for the Social Sciences is the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Visit: http://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca to learn more about opportunities.

For assistance on how to complete an ethical review process, you can access application guidelines and templates through your university. Here is an example of those available at MacEwan University: https://www.macewan.ca/wcm/OfficeofResearchServices/Ethics/index.htm (archived version).

A research report is typically structured as follows:

• Title Page
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Method Section
  • Participants (or Sample and Sample Selection)
  • Procedures
  • Design
• Results
• Discussion
• References
• Tables
• Figures
• Appendix (optional)

What to Include in a CV

Contact Information

The first page of your CV generally includes personal contact information and describes your educational background. Begin with the centered title “Curriculum Vitae.” Beneath this, insert your full name. On the next line, place your mailing address. Underneath this, include your work or home phone number, and your email address. The personal contact information should stand out on your CV, so it is okay to put this in bold, italics, or use a specialized, but easy-to-read font.

Education

If you have any additional certificates, awards, or acknowledgements that show you have other academic or employment-related accomplishments and skills, include them next so that they stand out to the reader. These could include technical certificates, diplomas, professional development or program completion certificates, as well as titles you have earned (e.g., Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate, Victim Services Trainer). Include a title that best fits the types of accomplishments listed such as:

Scholarships, Awards and Grants

If you have ever received money in the form of a grant, scholarship, award, travel subsidy, or sponsorship, include the name and a brief description of the award in a new section. Some people indicate the actual monetary value of the award and/or the applicable dates when the funding occurred. You may also include subsidized trips to another city to read an essay in a contest or to play a sport in a championship game, or an award from a church or community group. If you received the same award more than once, you can indicate the multiple years in which you received it. If you have multiple awards, consider dividing them into a few sections as shown below.

Work Experience

The next section of your curriculum vitae details your work experience. Indicate your recent employment history by naming the places of employment, your job titles, years of employment, and the main duties or applicable skills required for the positions. If possible, list some of your individual accomplishments. All jobs have accompanying duties – what special skills did you learn that a potential employer might be interested in? If you have a long listing of prior work experience (and most is not applicable to the job or graduate program you are applying for), consider only including the most recent.

Teaching and Research

Since this is an academic CV, the focus is on teaching and research. If you are an undergraduate student, you likely do not have direct teaching experience and limited research experience. In this case, incorporate some of your accomplishments from classes that you have taken. For example, create a heading “Professional Presentations” and itemize class presentations you have given, along with any other talks you have given as part of your work, committee, or extra-curricular activities. List your name as the author (and include the names of others if this was part of a group presentation), the title of the talk, its purpose, where it took place and the date it occurred.

How can you get some teaching experience? As an undergraduate, consider asking a former instructor of yours if you can help proctor a final exam or provide any other course support to gain some experience. You can even note that you are trying to build your CV and are looking for activities that relate to teaching. Many university departments offer teaching assistantships to graduate students who give guest lectures, help proctor and mark exams, and tutor undergraduate students for a designated course and professor. These experiences can all be included in your CV as shown below.

Eventually, you can replace the guest lecture and assistantship experiences with actual teaching appointments.

Include a separate section for your research experience. Ideally, you want to include publications that demonstrate your scholarly work. If you do not have a publication at this point in your life, you can create a list of essays and research reports. For each paper, include the title to indicate the area of research and the course name to reveal your program of study. You can also list formal presentations you have given such as a poster presentation or a talk during a student research day (see Appendix C for a sample poster). To demonstrate your abilities, emphasize when you have conducted data analyses, carried out research, and employed different methods, as shown in the examples below.

Publications

If you have scholarly publications, list the most recent publication first. When you become fairly established and you have multiple publications, you can start to subdivide this section into books or manuals, book chapters, scholarly publications, research abstracts, and so on as needed. A sample from one of the author’s publication records is given below.

Committees and Associations

Committee work is a form of professional service that is expected in many areas of employment. Committees can take a multitude of forms including voluntary organizations, planning groups, church groups, and associations. Everyone is expected to take their turn in helping their department develop new policies, hire new faculty, and operate within the larger institution. Committee membership has all sorts of benefits: exposure to new ideas, learning about policies and processes, and working with different people. A prospective employer may take notice of this section of your CV because committee membership also conveys more latent attributes such as the likelihood that you are a team player, that you are willing to take on additional service for the betterment of others, that are people-oriented, that you can work well in a group, and/or that you can get along with others.

References

The last section of your CV usually includes a current list of personal references. When building a list of people willing to provide you with a positive reference, try to cover a range of academic, work, and community-based affiliations. At least two references should be from people who are qualified to speak about your academic or work competencies and abilities (e.g., the department chair, your manager or supervisor, an instructor that knows your work well). In each case, include the person’s name, organization, job title, and relationship to you. Some sample references are provided below:

Other Considerations

How Long Should Your CV Be?

There is not a page limit on a CV, but you should try to keep it concise. One way to do this is to replace earlier work with more substantive accomplishments. For example, years from now you might replace your list of essays with abstracts and refereed articles that you published in scholarly journals. An early talk given in a class can be replaced with a teaching appointment. Keep an original long version CV that has every single one of your accomplishments in it even if it grows to ten or more pages. You can always create new, shorter CV’s from the original file, depending on the nature of a request. Perhaps you wish to emphasize your teaching experience for a possible position at a university. In this case, you might include information on every presentation, guest lecture, and teaching-related task you have done in the past. Alternatively, if you are applying for a research-based position at a university, you might abbreviate the teaching section but expand on your publication history.

Presentation Counts

If you need to make copies of your CV, use a high-quality printer and copier. Avoid the use of colour and fancy graphics.

Include a Cover Letter

Usually your CV accompanies a cover letter. The cover letter should be directed to the department head or individual in charge of hiring (e.g., a Department Chair or Director of Human Resources). In two-to-three short paragraphs, indicate what the position is you are applying for (and quote the competition number if applicable), why you are interested in the position, in what ways you meet the qualifications and that you have enclosed a copy of your curriculum vitae.

What Not To Include In Your CV

While composing the above sections of your CV, try to avoid including any of the following:

• A cute email address in your contact information such as: funchick@hotmail.com
• Any interests or hobbies, unless they are directly relevant to the job you are applying for.
• Your religious or political beliefs, marital status, age, etc.
• Reasons for leaving any jobs.
• References from friends or relatives.
• Long paragraphs – try to use point-from whenever possible.
• Any negative words or descriptions.
• A photo.

CV Checklist:

❏ Name and Contact Information

❏ Education

❏ Certifications and Professional Development

❏ Scholarships, Awards and Grants

❏ Work Experience

❏ Professional Presentations

❏ Teaching

❏ Research

❏ Publications

❏ Committees and Associations

❏ References

Additional Resources

• For additional information on how to write a CV, including how to condense a CV into a single page or two pages with samples, we highly recommend McGill University’s Guide located at: https://www.mcgill.ca/caps/files/caps/guide_cv.pdf
• To learn more about the categories or sections you can include in a CV, you might want to check out the information provided by University of Toronto’s Academic Advising and Career Centre at: https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/aacc/curriculum-vitae-cv
• For more information on the differences between resumes and CVs, including sample templates, you can examine information posted by University of Victoria’s Co-operative Education Program and Career Services at: https://www.uvic.ca/coopandcareer/career/applications/resumes/index.php
• For additional help on how to write a statement of intent, visit Berkeley’s Graduate Division “Writing the Statement of Purpose” page found at: http://grad.berkeley.edu/admissions/apply/statement-purpose

Running Head

Your title page has many components including a running head in the top left-hand corner, which is a requirement when submitting work for publication, and is sometimes required by professors in student research reports.

The running head is a mini-title that you can insert as a “header” to the top-left of every page of your research report. According to the  Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (2020), it should be no more than 50 characters long, and appear IN ALL CAPS. If your title is already less than 50 characters you can include the entire title; if it is longer, provide a shortened version. For example:

The running head helps to quickly identify your work and piece it back together in case the pages get dropped or another assignment gets mixed in with yours.

A page number should appear after your running head as part of the same header, aligned to the right of the page.

Title

A title is used to convey the focus or underlying topic for your study. Try to create a title that gives the reader a sense of what the study is about (e.g., Affirmative Action is too vague while Affirmative Action Hiring Practices by RCMP Utilized to Reflect Community Diversity tells us what to anticipate in the actual study).

The full title is as many as 10 to 12 words long and appears in Bold Title Case, centered on the title page, about 4 double-spaced lines down from the top of the page.

Author Information

The author line is one double-spaced line beneath the title. The author line includes your name and the names of anyone else who was directly involved with your research (e.g., if it was part of a group project with a group mark, you would include everyone’s names). Below this, note the institution your research is affiliated with (i.e., your school’s name).

Towards the bottom of the title page, centre the words Author Note in bold. If a research grant was used in any way to support your study (e.g., interview participants were compensated for their time, a software license was paid for by your program of study, or you applied for and received a travel grant to support a poster presentation of your findings at a conference), the source of the funding should be cited here on its own line.

Also, under the “Author Note” line, you need to include the name of a main contact person with an email address so that interested parties can correspond with that person for more information about the study. (Unless someone else headed up a group project that you participated in, you would put yourself down as the main contact person.)

Title Page Checklist

❏ On a separate, first page of your report

❏ Identifier title ("running head") in the top-left hand corner IN ALL CAPS

❏ Page number in the top-right hand corner

❏ Full title in title case, centered, bold text, starting about 4 double-spaced lines down the page

❏ Author line a double-space down from the full title

❏ Institutional affiliation below the author line

❏ Funding source, if applicable, and corresponding author and contact information noted in an "Author Note" section near the bottom of the page.

A research abstract should answer the following questions:

• What is the main research interest?
• Who are the participants or what comprised the sample?
• What is the research design?
• What are the main findings?
• What conclusions are reached?

Keywords

Abstract Checklist

❏ On a separate page

❏ Begins with the heading “Abstract,” centered in bold text at the top of the page

❏ Single-paragraph (not indented)

❏ Double-spaced

❏ Short (e.g., less than 250 words)

❏ Numbered as page two

An introduction states the purpose of your research and gets the reader interested in your study. This section outlines the literature and includes a statement of the central purpose of your research.

Questions that will help you develop your introduction:

• What is the central research question or problem under investigation?
• What does the literature say about this area of research?
• How does the present study contribute to the literature in this area?
• If your study is quantitative in nature - What are the main hypotheses?

Start your introduction with a very general statement that establishes the area that your study relates to. For example:

Continue narrowing the focus until you have described the problem under investigation and located it in the relevant literature. Also, make sure you write in the present tense throughout the introduction unless you are referring to what other researchers have found or done in their studies. For example:

Finally, describe how your study contributes to the literature and note the main objective of your research. For example:

If your study is quantitative in nature, be sure to state your hypotheses as precisely as you can and relate them back to the earlier literature. For example:

Introduction Checklist

❏ Follows the abstract

❏ Begins with the title in bold and centered at the top of page 3

❏ Double-spaced

❏ Indented new paragraphs

❏ Format conforms to an hour-glass shape

Questions to ask yourself as you create your method section:

• Who were the participants or what comprised the sample?
• What supplies were needed to carry out this study?
• Were the procedures described in a manner that is so clear and straight-forward that anyone reading it would be able to replicate the study?
• Was there a precise explanation for how the main variables were conceptualized?

 If your study was based on the examination of personal information included in Instagram posts (as opposed to information you gathered directly from participants), you would instead describe the sample and how you obtained it. For example, Modrall (see Appendix B) described her sample as:

The methods section also includes a paragraph that lists the setting and necessary materials used to conduct the study (e.g., the location, supplies that had to be purchased in advance, and/or any kind of equipment that was needed to record information). This information helps a reader understand exactly what would be needed to replicate a study of this nature. For example:

The research design is usually described under a sub heading within the methods section. This section very succinctly describes the overall form of the study (although a reader should also be able to infer this from the previous description provided in the procedures section). For example:

The last sub-section lists the dependent variable(s) and describes how they were measured. For example:

Method Checklist

❏ Follows the introduction

❏ Begins with the heading “Method,” centered and in bold text

❏ Page numbering continues from the previous section

❏ Double-spaced

❏ Indented new paragraphs

❏ Includes sub-headings in bold text aligned to the left, such as:

• • Participants
  • Setting and Materials
  • Procedures
  • Design
  • Dependent Variables

Results Checklist

❏ Follows the method section

❏ Begins with the heading “Results,” centered and in bold text

❏ Page numbering continues from the previous section

❏ Double-spaced

❏ Indented new paragraphs

❏ Main findings are reported

❏ Optional Table at end of paper lists data in columns and rows

❏ Optional Figure at end of paper shows the main results

Discussion questions to consider:

• Did this section provide an overall summary of the study?
• Was the study situated within the relevant literature?
• Were all the key findings described?
• Are the main findings related back to the literature?
• Are there any alternative explanations for the findings?
• Is the importance of the study evident?
• Are limitations of this study introduced?
• Were suggestions provided for ways to improve this research?

Discussion Checklist

❏ Follows the results section

❏ Begins with the heading “Discussion,” centered in bold text

❏ Page numbering continues from the previous section

❏ Double-spaced

❏ Indented new paragraphs

❏ Main findings are described

❏ Findings are situated in the relevant literature

❏ Implications for future research are noted

References Checklist

❏ Title "References" centered and in bold text

❏ Separate page

❏ Double-spaced

❏ APA format unless otherwise noted by your instructor or the editor of a journal (see Chapter 5 for an overview of APA)

Tables are placed in their own section because they sometimes detract from the text of your report. In addition, when you send an article to a publisher, the editor reserves the right to fit your table into the text of the document where it is most appropriate given the space limitations and page setup of the actual journal. You can refer to the table in your results section by stating, for instance, “as shown in Table 1” or "(see Table 5)."

Tables Checklist

Appendix Checklist

Outline of the Book

• Chapter 1 focuses on specific strategies for studying, including how to translate course activities and readings into meaningful lecture notes, how to organize lecture notes into study notes, and how to study effectively.
• Chapter 2 explains multiple-choice, short-answer, and essay questions, including how the questions are developed and how best to tackle exams based on them.
• Chapter 3 explains how to write an essay including how to narrow your topic and outline your ideas.
• Chapter 4 describes methods for navigating the library and the Internet to find appropriate reference materials for course assignments.
• Chapter 5 covers referencing using APA format, the most commonly used citation style in the social sciences.
• Chapter 6 describes the objectives and main components of a research proposal including important ethical considerations in research.
• Chapter 7 outlines the main format for writing a publishable research report.
• Chapter 8 covers how to start developing a curriculum vitae that conveys your academic achievements to a potential employer or supports your application into graduate studies.
• Appendices include a sample essay, research report, and poster by students who earned high marks and whose writing demonstrates many of the principles outlined in this book.

This chapter covers some of the key skills needed to write an academic paper, including strategies to narrow down a topic, outline ideas and ensure academic integrity. 

By following the suggestions provided in this section, you can write a research report that impresses your instructor, provides the structure for a possible honour’s thesis, can be used as a sample of your work for potential entrance into a graduate school, helps prepare you to design more advanced research (e.g., a master’s thesis), and gets you into the practice of using a format required for publication in most scholarly journals.

Figures Checklist

Scan the Table of Contents and the Headings

Read the Preface, Introduction, or Abstract

Take a Quick Look at the Index

Reading About Topics and Concepts

1. Read only one or a few small sections at a time.
2. Read once without highlighting or taking notes. (Upon the first read, most of the content might feel important, so if you highlight right away, you might highlight more than is necessary!)
3. Go back and decide what is important and then highlight, underline, or take notes. Focus on key words and phrases that will help you remember concepts quickly when you go back through your text.
4. In the margin of your textbook, write cues that you can use to test yourself. For example, in a section of your textbook discussing deviance you might write:

• • Define deviance.
  • 3 factors determining deviance.
  • 3 sociological paradigms explaining deviance and crime.

Reading Arguments

Visit Your University's Writing Centre

One of the best ways to learn how to write is to get regular feedback on your writing and to discuss your drafts with others. University writing centres are spaces for students to get feedback on how their writing is received by a reader, to learn helpful strategies from other writers, and to get information that can help them make their own decisions about their revisions. Remember, however, that while utilizing these services can help inform how your work is structured and communicated, you are always ultimately responsible for your own writing and editing.

Read Read Read

It is no accident that most good writers are also prolific readers. Reading helps us to pick up on things like grammar, syntax, punctuation, tone, structure, language, and flow. If you are hoping to improve your academic writing, however, it is important to read academic sources and to pay attention to how the authors of these sources write and how their writing may feel different than that in other types of sources, like blogs or news articles. In addition to reading for content, also start paying attention to the rhythm, structure, and language of scholarly writing. Soon, you will get a sense of what kind of academic style and voice you like best, and over time, you will start to be able to emulate it in your own writing.

Review Feedback on Your Work

Lastly, pay careful attention to the feedback you receive on written assignments and essays. Professors take considerable time to include this feedback to help students understand why they got the grades that they did. If you tend to get papers handed back with question marks in the margins or comments like "unclear" or "please explain", it is a sign that you can expand further on some of your ideas or that some of your phrasing is unclear. If you tend to get papers back with comments like, "okay, but what about..." or "this is contrary to...," it may signal that you can strengthen your next paper by taking more time to consider potential counterarguments or that you may want to meet with a librarian for your next paper to help you ensure you take into account more of the available research. Whether you are satisfied with your grade or not, reading these comments and considering how you would make revisions based on them goes a long way in helping you further develop your academic writing skills and scholarly voice. 

Explanatory or Expository Essays

These are intended to inform the reader about a specific topic or issue. They should usually provide as unbiased an account as possible, without taking a position. Think of this as being almost like a detailed encyclopedia entry. Though some university students may be required to write expository essays, most university-level essays will require students to formulate and argue a thesis, or position.

Book Reports or Precis

The function of a book report or precis is to summarize a book’s main purpose and ideas and perhaps comment on who the book might be of interest to or how it will relate to a specific research topic. In some cases, students may need to critically examine the work as well, commenting on how well it achieved its aims. Again, this type of writing is less common in university-level courses with the exception of perhaps some introductory courses, or if a precis or book report is assigned, it is often intended to be one component of a larger research project that will eventually call for a more scholarly research paper to be written.

Critical Reviews

These include some summary of a source, but they go a step further and critique or evaluate the source using certain criteria, such as the author's methodology, use of evidence, or potential for bias.

Literature Reviews

Literature reviews summarize many sources at once, providing an overview of some of the key sources related to a topic, including which scholars’ works appear to be most influential within the field, how our understanding of the topic has changed over time or what themes are prevalent in the literature, what conclusions can be drawn from the body of literature, and what questions remain unanswered by it. Literature reviews may be written on their own, or they may be one component of a research paper, used to establish context for the research by helping to explain what gaps the researcher intends to address or why they chose a particular methodology over another.

Research Reports

As discussed in more detail in Chapter 7, research reports report the findings and significance of an author’s own primary research. They typically include a literature review to help establish what is already known about the topic and how this research will help fill a knowledge gap in the field, and then they provide the reader with information about the methodology used, the variables accounted for and the limitations of the study. They then report findings from the study and discusses the significance of these findings and directions for future research. The function is to detail as clearly as possible the research process and findings so that a reader can determine whether the results are reliable, how the findings help to answer the research question and add to our knowledge of the subject, and what questions might remain that further research can help to answer.

Argumentative Essays

These are essays where the researcher a stance on an issue (i.e., presents a thesis) and provides supporting evidence to argue that thesis. In this case, the function of the essay is to present a compelling argument or viewpoint that is clearly articulated, easy for the reader to follow, and uses sound reasoning and fair representation of research sources. That said, argumentative essays can be dangerously misleading in their apparent simplicity, with many undergraduate students underestimating the complexity of some of these features that make up a good academic argument.

Here are a few things to keep in mind about argumentative essays:

• “Compelling” does not mean “right” or “above criticism.” All academic work is subject to critique. That is the point of academia—to engage in healthy debate and critical discussion. You can write a well-executed essay about why a government’s policies on immigration are in need of revision, but a reader may still disagree with you if they believe the evidence you have used points to a different conclusion, if they are viewing the issue through a different theoretical lens than you, or if they are aware of other information that disrupts your argument. Academics are continually engaging in a sort of scholarly conversation with each other through the essays and articles that they write, and this is why you must always think critically about the sources you read and be open to changing your position if new information comes to light. 
• “Easy to follow” does not always mean “simple.” It is fair to assume that your reader is a capable reader who can comprehend complex writing. It is not fair to assume, however, that your reader is going to automatically draw connections between your ideas for you or to give you the benefit of the doubt when you have not fully explained something. Your job as a writer is to present your ideas in a logical sequence, to use paragraphs or section headings to clearly signal when you have moved from one idea to another, to use appropriate topic sentences that make each point clear to your reader, to use appropriate transitions to indicate the relationship between your sentences and ideas (e.g., to add emphasis to a previous point, provide contrast, or illustrate an idea), and to observe the rules of grammar and punctuation so that what you intended to say is the same message the reader receives.

Sound reasoning and fair presentation of ideas are a big part of academic writing. At the university level, constructing an argument is not as simple as making a claim, thinking of three supporting points, and cherry-picking a few good quotes to support each point. As you start to make decisions about what your supporting points are going to be and what evidence you are going to use to back them up, pay attention to whether any of them might contradict each other, whether they complement each other enough to feel cohesive instead of like a list of disparate points, whether they have not just some evidence to support them but whether they have good evidence to support them, and whether you have adequately considered and accounted for other possible conclusions. It is often the case, too, that we begin the research process with one argument in mind but come to change our position when the research reveals another answer, and it is our ability to base our arguments on the evidence that is available rather than on the evidence we want to see that is a mark of good scholarship.

Along those same lines, you need to make sure when using research sources that you are taking your sources into account in their entirety, even if you are using only part of a source as evidence. Research is an exercise in understanding and purposefully using sources, not in scanning a few articles for a few good quotations to throw into a paper. Pulling one sentence or idea out of an article to support your claim when the full context of the article suggests something different or when that one idea reflects only a very minor part of the article does not make for a fair representation of your research sources.

The introduction section should be double-spaced and numbered page two, with the title “Introduction” centered at the top of the page. This section begins with a general statement that identifies your area of interest. For instance:

Try to narrow the focus over the next couple of sentences and end the paragraph with the key statement you wish to investigate. As a made-up example:

The literature review typically provides an overview of relevant prior research on the topic. As another made-up example:

It is also important to discuss and integrate the main issues and findings within a theoretical context. For instance:

Lastly, this section notes the contributions of the present study to the existing literature and introduces your working hypotheses or more refined research interest. In this case, you note how this study adds to, clarifies, or expands upon existing research:

A working hypothesis is a statement about the relationship between variables. It provides a prediction of what the current study might determine, such as:

Introduction Checklist

❏ Starts on a separate page, numbered as page two

❏ Title “Introduction,” centered

❏ Double-spaced

❏ Identifies the area of interest

❏ Defines the main concepts

❏ Summarizes key research in the area

❏ Establishes the theoretical context

❏ Introduces a working hypothesis (if applicable)

❏ Notes the contributions of the present study

Participants

Setting and Materials

Procedures

Main Variables

Method Checklist

❏ Title section “Method,” in bold text and centered

❏ Double-spaced

❏ Participants and how they will be obtained or Units of Analysis

❏ Setting and Materials

❏ Procedures

❏ Main Variable(s)

In writing your proposal, you need to discuss the relevant ethical concerns and how you plan to address them. Here are some questions to consider that may help you determine how ethical issues pertain to your study:

• Who are the participants for your study and how do you plan to recruit them?
• What kind of information are you collecting?
• Will you ask participants any kind of sensitive or personal questions?
• How will responses be kept confidential?
• How will information about individuals in the study be safeguarded?
• Does participating in your study involve any risk of injury?
• How might the procedures of your study pose psychological implications for participants?
• Is any kind of deception necessary in the procedures for carrying out your study?

Most Canadian research ethics boards adhere to the Tri Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Human Participants (Canadian Institutes of Health Research et al, 2018), also known as TCPS 2. Outlined next are some of the major ethical issues incorporated in the policy.

Respect for Human Dignity

The core value of the TCPS 2 (Canadian Institutes of Health Research et al, 2018) is respect for human dignity meaning that all research involving humans as participants must be planned and conducted in a manner that is sensitive to the worthiness of individuals such that their safety and overall well-being is paramount. For example, a study should be designed in a manner that minimizes the potential for harm. Harm may be in the form of physical injury, as might be the case if the study entails a physical activity or exercise. But it can also take more subtle forms that are difficult to define, measure, or even predict in advance as in the case of psychological stress or strain. For example, in a study about driving, you might want to interview motorists about behaviours they engage in. A participant in your study might answer a question and later regret having done so, or the participant might feel discomfort while recalling a careless driving episode. Every effort must be made in the research planning process to identify potential sources of harm and include means for mitigating them (e.g., participants are told they do not have to answer all questions and they are reminded of this at various stages). An ethics committee considers, among other questions, whether the benefits of the research outweigh the potential risks of harm and whether participants knowingly and willingly agree to take on any potential risks. Finally, participants need to understand that their participation is voluntary and that they can withdraw their participation at any time without penalty.

Free and Informed Consent

All participants give informed consent prior to the onset of the study. Informed consent means that potential participants agree to participate in the study only after learning about the requirements and possible risks of participation. This information is typically outlined in a consent form that the participants read and then sign. For example, a consent form could note that students are being asked to participate in a fifteen-minute study on mood and violence in television programming. Requirements would include filling out a very short questionnaire assessing their current mood, watching a two-minute video clip that depicts a shoot-out from an old Western movie that is rated PG, and then filling out another short questionnaire. Subjects are ensured that their participation is voluntary and that they are free to withdraw that participation at any time without penalty.

In the case of a proposed observational study of aggressive behaviour among children, consent would need to be obtained from the children, the day care director, the day care staff, and the parents or legal guardians of the children since they are under the age at which they can legally consent to participating in such a study. The proposal would need to clearly outline the objectives of the study (i.e., the intended uses of the information gathered), how the participants would be observed (e.g., via trained observers unobtrusively standing behind the one-way glass viewing area oblivious to the children), and so on. Although it increases reliability in the coding of aggressive behaviour, recording the children would likely not be a recommended method of observation since it poses additional risks (e.g., privacy concerns) to an already vulnerable participant group. Lastly, note that consent is an ongoing process. Hence, while consent may be given in advance of participation, participants also need to be aware that consent is freely given and thus can also be revoked at any time without penalty.

Respect for Privacy and Confidentiality

Another ethical concern related to participating in research centers on privacy and confidentiality. Privacy is protected by legislation, for instance the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act in Alberta (https://www.servicealberta.ca/foip), and it must be handled in accord with existing guidelines. Confidentiality means that although a researcher may be able to identify a given respondent (e.g., perhaps the participant in a case study was a former prostitute who is known to the researcher who interviewed her), the researcher promises not to do so publicly. In this case, the researcher may report some of the conversation shared in the interview but promises not to release any details that might identify the individual interviewee.

Use of Deception and the Need for Debriefing

In rare cases, some details of a study are initially withheld from the participants. In an experiment, for example, it may be essential to leave out details about the procedures to successfully manipulate an independent variable that tests a causal relationship that cannot be explored with full disclosure. For instance, a researcher may wish to study students’ reactions to a request for course assistance by another student who is a stranger (e.g., a fictitious student). If the researcher informed participants in advance that someone unknown to them was about to ask for their course notes (i.e., the independent variable or manipulation in an experimental design), the psychological process would be compromised. In this case, the researcher explains the need for deception in the research proposal and outlines that participants would be notified of the deception and its purpose at the end of the study (e.g., immediately after the decision to lend or not lend the notes becomes apparent).

All of these considerations are weighed out in advance by ethics review board members who ultimately determine whether the study can proceed as described (i.e., it receives ethical approval), that procedures or other elements of the proposed study need to be modified before proceeding, (i.e., conditional approval), or that potential harm exceeds the overall benefits of the research (i.e., the study is not granted ethical approval and cannot be carried out as described). Consult with your instructor about ethics and the need to undergo a review process if you plan to conduct research involving humans as participants. Most universities have online resources such as templates and checklists for assisting in the creation of consent forms and completing an ethical review application form.

Please refer to Chapter 5 for a detailed description of how to properly reference the work of others.