You will need to lay out your basic concept and direction within the first page or so of the paper. Having a thesis statement is incredibly helpful, and is something you’ve likely already done in your proposal. The paper should follow the current APA style. If you look at the rubric for the paper, you will see that APA formatting and references are a non-trivial portion of the final paper grade. You will need an APA title page, an abstract, and references page(s) in your final paper.
Quotations
Published psychology papers rarely, if ever, use quotations from previous work. Unlike some disciplines, psychology requires their authors to paraphrase previous work when discussing it. Keeping with this tradition, in this paper you will be allowed to use one quote no longer than two lines of text. Subsequent quotations will be penalized.
Format
The paper should be 8-10 double-spaced pages in length. Note that the title page, abstract, reference pages, and any figures or graphs you include do not count towards your page requirements. Margins, font, and font size should be standard to the current APA style.
Accuracy
Your paper should also be error-free in terms of grammar and spelling, so make sure to proofread carefully; spell check doesn’t catch all mistakes. Please note that the rubric counts style as a part of your final grade.
Academic Sources
You should have at least 6 peer-reviewed journal articles, academic books, or chapters from academic books as sources for the paper, not including your text. Any article you retrieve from Columbia College’s PsycARTICLES database or the EBSCOhost Psychology & Behavioral Sciences Collection is appropriate. Please note that newspapers and popular periodicals (e.g.; Time, Psychology Today) are not academic sources, nor are internet sites (e.g.; Wikipedia). These sources may be used for additional information or anecdotes or the like, but they will not count toward the source requirements.You can find information about how to distinguish between scholarly and popular press articles in this library resource.
Peer discussions:
1. self-fulfilling prophecy, 2. Self-Concept, 3. attitude, 4. conformity (Milgram’s study),
5. prosocial behavior 6. realistic conflict theroy
