How to Write a College Research Paper

Set the tone to your research paper by picking a topic you are interested in. This will make the topic more interesting for you and make you want to find out more. Research papers can seem intimidating at first, especially when your teacher/professor tells you it must be 20 pages in length. But don't worry; you can just follow these steps to design your college research paper.

Instructions

1. Choose a topic that you want to research. This can be a personal topic of choice, a topic related to your job, or something you want to pursue in the future.

2. Know what genre of research paper you are writing. It can be an analytical paper that uses evidence to analyze facets of a topic. Or it can be an argumentative college research paper that uses evidence to attempt to convince the others of your perspective on a controversial issue.

3. Write a hypothesis. This is a statement of what the experiment needs to prove. For example, for an education major, a good hypothesis might be: the environment that a child grows up in affects a child social/emotional development.

4. Develop an abstract. This is a brief summary outlining the main content of a journal article or other document.

5. Write your introduction giving a brief overview of what you plan to research. Decide on the method for which you will do your research. One choice can be videotaping. The method section is critical to the importance of your paper to show the validity; it's the meat of the paper. This is where your description of the experiment is divulged and your writings of how you conducted your experiment to prove your hypothesis.

6. Design and write your results to your research. Explain what happened in the experiment and be specific and concise.

7. Provide a discussion segment that allows you to tell the reader what happened in the experiment in your opinion and some changes that might have happened in results to your findings.

8. Finish your college research paper with the conclusion. This will give your reader the sense of whether the experiment was successful or not, and whether you answered your hypothesis or not.

9. Site specific references appropriately that you have used in your research paper. How you site your references will be determined by your teacher and will be in either MLA format or APA format.

Tips & Warnings

• You need to define terms, be specific and objective in answering your research question, have the basic knowledge to understand your experiment's validity, and have sited appropriate references in the format of MLA or APA, depending on the request from your teacher.

Resources

• Psych experiment
• Science Buddies