Research Paper Guidelines
Purpose: This project provides an opportunity for students to develop and/or refine their skills at researching, collecting, and analyzing primarily data. The project also provides an opportunity for students to critically assess previous studies in the areas they have chosen for their research topic to either test out existing information or further a particular question that was lacking from your literature review.
Each student is expected to undertake and complete a research project that will advance their own knowledge and skill in some aspects of Asians in an American community.
The Research Paper should be 5-7 double-spaced pages in length, not counting a required APA-style cover page, in-text citations, and a works cited page. The paper is going to be graded based on four main sections: Introduction, Method, Results and Conclusion.
In the introduction section, students are required to give an overview of their topic through their library research. Your task here is to provide me with information about your topic. What have people written in relation to your topic? If your topic is not directly addressed in your library research, you should look at a related topic to help you understand and/or put your topic in context to this class. It is very important that you make a clear thesis statement or hypothesis of your research project.
In the method section, students are expected to state the method they have chosen to gather their data – including rationale for topic of interest and what the process was for obtaining specific information, articles, and narrowing down results for their topic. What kind of databases, research methods, experiments, or studies did the student come across when narrowing their search?
In the results/discussion section, students are required to summarize their findings in some
logical manner, either by theme or major concepts you discovered from your literature review.
After you present your findings, students are expected to discuss and make some assessment of
their findings. Students should give some explanation to why they think their findings came out
the way it did using concepts presented in readings, class lectures, or class discussions.
In the conclusion section, you are required to summarize your key findings (approximately 3-5
findings). Then, you should discuss the significance and or contributions of your topic to Asian
American community health. Lastly, you will provide some recommendations to future research.