There are three main kinds of APA papers that you will have to write as a Psychology student.

The first is a Reflection Paper, which provides you with a scientific article and asks you to critically analyze it and give your opinion on its merit. For help with this, click here.

The second is a Literature Review, which asks you to write about a certain topic and the research that has been conducted on it so far. There is no experiment of your own in a literature review. If you’re looking for help with this, you’re on the right page!

The third is an Experimental Paper, which requires you to choose a topic, create an experiment, analyze the results, and write about them, along with an Introduction and Discussion section. If you’re looking for help with this, you’re also on the right page!

If you have the paper written already and need help with citations and formatting, click here.

Writing a Literature Review

A literature review requires you to sum up the relevant literature on your topic. The page length requirement and difficulty of the class will dictate how in depth you will need to go on the topic. The format of a literature review in APA format will be as follows:

1. Cover page

2. Abstract

3. The Body of the paper (see pg.)

4. Discussion Section (see pg.)

5. References

Note: Some professors will ask that you do not include an abstract, while others require one. Check with your professor on this.

Note #2: Professors will often give a rubric and step-by-step instructions on what to include in each section - if so, follow that rubric exactly. If your professor does not give you this information, I would suggest you follow my organization “rubric” to ensure you get a good grade.

The Body of the Paper - The body of the paper can be a daunting task. What I like to do is create subsections within the body of the paper. It organizes the material very well for both you and the reader. This requires that you think about what you will put in the paper.

If you are writing an Abnormal Psychology paper about a disorder (let’s say, depression), it makes sense for the body of your paper to have subsections such as these:

Etiology

Symptoms and Presentation

Treatment

If you are writing a Social Psychology paper about whether video games cause violence in children, you might want to create the following subsections:

Theoretical Perspectives

Relevant Research

Future Studies

Once you have filled out these subsections with research, you will need to write an Abstract, Introduction, and Discussion. This is what should go into each section:

Abstract - The abstract is a 150 to 250 word summary of your entire paper. If you have created subsections, you should have a concise 1-2 sentence summary of the Introduction, 1-2 sentence summary of each subsection, and 1-2 sentence summary of the Discussion. If you have not created subsections, you should have a 1-2 sentence summary of the Introduction, a few sentences on the main points of the body of your paper, and a 1-2 sentence summary of the Discussion.

Introduction - As the name indicates, you are introducing the reader to the subject - that means you must define every keyword and important concept you have written about. If your paper is about depression, you must define depression and give an overview of why the issue is important and worth studying. This means including how many people are affected by depression and the consequences of depression (e.g. missed work days, higher unemployment rates, increased risk for suicide). After this, you will need to give a general overview of the research conducted so far. The best way to go about this is to search for the keywords of your topic (e.g. depression etiology; video game aggressive children) and then read the Introduction section of those papers.

Discussion - After you’ve written the body of the paper, the Discussion section is where you critically analyze all of the research you have written about, directions for future research, and limitations of the studies so far. Make sure to mention where there are gaps in the literature.

Example #1: “While there is a large body of literature devoted to depression in college students, there is less research on depression in children. Understanding how depression presents differently in children is crucial in order to create interventions and treatments for this population”.

Example #2: “Patients with antisocial personality disorder are notoriously difficult to treat, but there are also significant institutional barriers associated with treatment. Many therapists are reluctant to treat ASPD and insurance companies often do not pay for treatment for individuals diagnosed with ASPD”.

Writing an Experimental Psychology Paper

This article will provide you with information on how to chose a topic for your experiment, conduct a literature search, organize and understand the sections, and summarize the findings. Your professor likely has a rubric for exactly how to structure the paper according to his or her preferences, so let that be the final say. This article will NOT cover how to choose a statistical test for your experiment. For help with this, I find UCLA’s chart helpful.

I suggest writing an article in this order:

1. Methods, as it’s best to get it out of the way and it includes technicalities that you may have questions on (giving you ample time to email your professor and classmate those questions)

2. Results

3. Introduction and discussion at the same time, filling in the blanks of your professor’s requirements as you read the research in this area

4. Abstract, as it is a 1-2 sentence summary of every other section of the paper.

Step 1. Select a Topic

The APA Dictionary of Psychology is a great place to start. This website defines over 25,000 Psychology terms. Since many of these terms involve theories and concepts, it’s a great place to look for ideas.

This came up searching for theory. I decided to pick one at random: theory of mind.

Now, we have to consider whether we could use this in an experiment. The definition shows that it’s something all (save for neurological deficits) adults have, children under 4-5 lack, and animals may or may not have. As a college student, you’ll probably want to use fellow students as participants, so this option doesn’t work.

Back to square one. This time, I’m going to try “theory of personal investment”.

Much better. I’m seeing some key words that suggest this could be measured: “the degree to which” (dependent variable) and “is a function of” (independent variable). Here, the dependent variable is the personal resources, or the time and effort, somebody will invest in an activity, and this can be explained by their 1) personal incentives, 2) beliefs about themselves, and 3) perceived options.

For the purposes of a research methods class, three independent variables are a lot to cover. Each of them will have to be measured, so we need to simplify things. I’m going to delve further into personal incentives. Remember, I’ll be surveying college students – perhaps seeing what incentivizes people to try hard in school?

A quick search reveals that a mastery orientation is when somebody is motivated by a desire to learn, while a competitive orientation is a motive to be better than others. An affiliation incentive is motivation to be liked by others, while status would mean the motivation to do well in school in order to gain acceptance into a grad program or network with professors.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s break this down further by choosing just two independent variables to work with. A quick Google search revealed that the two most frequently studied are mastery orientation and competitive orientation (which is more commonly called performance orientation), so we’re going to stick with those two.

Step 2: Find scales of measurement

Now we have a clear dependent variable (personal investment) and an independent variable (mastery vs performance orientation). The next step is to operationalize those variables, or find a working definition so that we can measure them.

Consider how vague our dependent variable is: personal investment. The term is highly subjective and difficult to measure. Perhaps we’re better off asking a different question: Are students better off with a mastery or a status orientation? “Better off” can be measured with just one number: their GPA. Now we’ve simplified the dependent variable. Let’s go online and see what comes up for the other two.

The good news is that for most of these, psychology scholars have already done the work for us.

When you want to see what’s out there, a Google search or Google Scholar is the most efficient way of finding relevant articles – however, you’ll only be able to see a small portion unless you pay for the rest. That’s where your college library website comes into play.

Use your college’s website to gain access to this article, which will provide you with a survey you can use in your college paper (while crediting the author of the scale, of course).

Now we can do the same for performance motivation.

The second link looks promising.

Step 3: Write out the variables and hypothesis and select a statistical analysis

Here’s what we have so far:

Independent variable #1: Mastery motive (Learning or task goal)

Independent Variable #2: Performance/Competitive motive (Desire to demonstrate ability by performing better than others)

Dependent Variable: GPA

Remember that mastery motive and performance motive are what researchers call separate constructs – there are people who will have a high mastery motive and a high-performance motive as well, people who will have a high mastery motive and low performance motive, people who will have a high-performance motive and mastery motive, and finally people who will be low in both. These represent four separate groups of people that we will want to compare with one another. Here, an 2x2 ANOVA analysis would be appropriate.

Now we have to hypothesize about what we think the GPA would be for these four groups. These groups are outlined below:

2x2 ANOVA

Group 1. High in IV 1, high in IV 2

Group 2. High in IV 1, low in IV 2

Group 3. Low in IV 1, low in IV 2

Group 4. Low in IV 1, high in IV 2

Normally you would have to do a literature review to learn what previous research has found in the area (which is our next step!) but I will present the general gist right now:

Research has found that a mastery motive is more beneficial than a competitive motive – so we can hypothesize that those with a mastery motive (who want to learn) will have a higher GPA than those with a competitive motive (who want to look smart). What if someone has both a high competitive motive and a high mastery motive? Let’s hypothesize that they have the highest GPA of all – they are the most motivated out of the four groups. How about those who lack motivation in either mastery or performance? They probably have the lowest GPA. Now we’re left with just two groups – those high in performance and low in mastery and those high in mastery and low in performance. Let’s hypothesize that these will be somewhere in the middle – since mastery motive is generally more beneficial, we can hypothesize the following:

Hypothesis

High in IV 1 and high in IV 2 = Highest GPA (1st place)

Low in IV 1 and low in IV 2 = Lowest GPA (4th place)

High in IV 1, low in IV 2 = In the middle (2nd place)

High in IV 2, low in IV 1 = In the middle (3rd place)

Step 4: Conduct a Literature Search & Write the Paper

In research papers, absolutely everything has to be defined and explained thoroughly. This is one reason why it’s so difficult for students to learn APA style papers. Don’t rely on my (or most other website’s) definition of terms, either – they have to come from a scientific journal. Now we begin the literature search, where we define mastery and performance orientation and learn about the research that has been carried out on these topics.

Using your college’s library database, there should be an option to search for articles. It should look something like this:

We’re going to start by entering key words in no particular order – terms we know need to be included in a paper for it to be relevant to us. I’m going to type in “mastery motivation college students”.

These two articles come up. Notice that each one is about a highly specific topic different from our experiment. Still, they are measuring mastery motivation in college students, so I’m going to click on each and skim through the introduction section only (this will give me a brief overview and definitions).

After skimming the two, I find that neither paper has what we’re looking for – a clear and thorough definition of mastery orientation which we can apply to our study. Going further down the list, I found another article (Schweinle & Helming, 2011). This is a snippet of the article that is relevant for our paper:

Now, the following approach may not work for everyone, but my students find it helpful to write all of the relevant information down as they read it, rather than finishing the Introduction first before moving onto the Discussion. A lot of this information is relevant to our paper. The research on goal orientations and views on challenges, for example, would add substance and depth to the paper. But as we go through each paper, we’ll find that the information is presented out of the order of the paper we’re writing. We may stumble across this article while writing our Discussion and already having finished our Introduction – or we may see an article with information that would go best in our Discussion, but we haven’t finished our Introduction yet.

When we see a relevant piece of research, how do we know where it belongs best? Research findings are relevant to our abstract, introduction, and discussion. Think of it this way:

The Abstract should contain a 1-2 sentence summary of each section of your paper – 1-2 sentences from the introduction, 1-2 sentences from the methods, etc. The research findings that belong best here will be very general and the research findings you choose should represent the entire study.

If I wanted to use that article snippet in my abstract, I might write the following:

“Academically, students may be motivated by a performance orientation (i.e. wishing to do well relative to peers) or a mastery orientation (i.e. wishing to understand the material) (Schweinle & Helming, 2011).

The Introduction allows for a greater exploration of these concepts. For example, I might write this in my introduction (note that the following assumes I have already properly defined mastery goal orientation and performance goal orientation):

Example: “Students differ in their academic goals and motivations, and these differences may affect their academic success (Schweinle & Helming, 2011). For instance, students with a mastery orientation are likelier to pursue academic challenges matter (cite the cited paper*). Students with a performance orientation could either see challenges as opportunities or threats, affecting their likelihood of pursuing or avoiding the challenge (cite the cited paper*).

*You have a couple options here in terms of citation. Even though you read those study’s findings in this article, the authors of this article are citing another author. It would be incorrect to cite the paper you are reading now for those study’s findings. However, the sentences that follow those study’s findings (“Students with a mastery goal orientation…their success at academic tasks), or the rest of the paragraph, are conclusions drawn by the author of the paper you are currently reading. If you use the author’s conclusions in your paper, cite the author of this paper. If you are citing the study, however, you must cite the original paper.

Sometimes, researchers mess up. They interpret things in a way that’s different than the original authors intended. If no one ever referred to the original source, there would be a game of telephone and eventually the articles would start lying and misrepresenting the study’s findings out of sheer laziness of not reading the original source. If you go this route and blindly take the author’s interpretation of the study’s findings, then you run the risk of being wrong (and of someone spotting your mistake).

The responsible thing to do is to actually find those articles and skim them to make sure everything is correct, and then cite those articles. But how about if you’re pressed for time and if you can’t find that article online no matter how much you try? In that case, you can cite the information as follows:

For instance, students with a mastery orientation are likelier to pursue academic challenges (Elliott & Dweck, 1988, as cited by Schweinle & Helming, 2011).

Hints that the Research Findings Belong in the Introduction:

1. It includes definitions of the key terms of your subject (especially the variables!)

2. It gives an overview of the research has been conducted on the topic, especially when related to the hypothesis of your study.

The Discussion section interprets the findings of our experiment, in light of the relevant data that we have discussed in the introduction. Let’s say that we carried out our undergraduate experiment and found that students with a mastery orientation have a higher GPA. We could use the article snippet in many ways: to support our findings, provide evidence against our findings, and display a limitation of our findings, among other possibilities.

Example: Although our study found that those with a mastery orientation had higher GPA’s, we did not assess whether the students felt challenged by their coursework. If students motivated by mastery pursued more challenging courses, then the positive effect of mastery motivation could be even greater than anticipated. Future research may include objective measures of course difficulty or student’s account of how challenging the course is.

Hints that the Research Findings Belong in the Discussion:

1. It includes research that is beyond the scope of our study, highlighting our limitations. For example, if we relied on a self-report survey but another study had interesting findings after conducting a qualitative interview, we might want to discuss the drawbacks of surveys.

2. It includes research that is beyond the scope of our study, highlighting future areas of research (what we just wrote in our mock discussion section).

3. It supports or contradicts our results. This shows the kind of analytical thinking crucial for getting a good grade in the discussion section. For example, if a study found that performance motivation led to a higher GPA, but our results found that mastery motivation led to a higher GPA, we should compare the two studies and reason through why the results may be different.

Now that you’ve successfully written an APA paper, don’t forget to cite and format it!

If you like my writing style, and feel like you'd benefit from one-on-one tutoring to help you reach your academic goals in any area of psychology, please contact me. From aiding you in succeeding in class, prepping for a major exam, or teaching you the ins-and-outs of research methods, I'm here to help!

Mar 28 How do I Write an APA Paper?