Develop Scholarly Writing Skills

Develop Scholarly Writing Skills

[Edit the running head as explained in the week 1 template, fill in your name and date below, erase instructions in blue and red font.

The syllabus instructions for week 5 require you to submit two assignments and there are two droboxes provided. This assignment will be submitted in the Week 5 – Assignment 1 dropbox. Be sure you submit the second assignment in the Week 5 – Assignment 2 dropbox, otherwise your grade may not be recorded properly. Be careful you do not submit both assignments in the same dropbox.]

Develop Scholarly Writing Skills

Develop Scholarly Writing Skills

[Immediately under the title above, offer a brief one or two sentence introduction. Immediately following the introduction present a purpose statement for the assignment. For example, for this assignment your purpose statement could read as follows. The purpose of this assignment is to further develop my scholarly writing skills by improving an earlier piece of my writing.

Note: this assignment is worth 15% of your final grade for the entire course. You should invest significant time and energy into completing it. The most common way students fall short in this assignment is to offer simplistic personal reflections about their problem instead of utilizing the five scholarly articles they located during week 4 to support the key claims they make in their problem statement. Another common way to fall short in this assignment is to not properly format their in-text citations and their references at the end of the paper.  The guidance offered below is essential to your success in this assignment.]

Problem Statement from Unit Two

[Copy and paste your problem statement from unit 2. Do not alter it in any way in this section. Include the full problem statement which according to the unit two syllabus instructions would be about 200-300 words. Do not be confused by the word “statement” that appears in the headings above and below. In this case, it is not referring to a single sentence. It might help to think of it as a problem description. You are to present your fully developed problem statement (description) in its original form in this section, and in its fully revised form below. Both statements (descriptions) should be in the range of 200 to 300 words or more if you wish.]

Rewritten Version of Problem Statement

[Following syllabus guidance, rewrite your entire problem statement which is about one page long so it reflects all you have learned up to this point about scholarly writing. There are three ways students have fallen short completing this assignment in the past.

First, they do not support the key claims they make in their problem description using in-text citations of the sources they found in week four. Instead they offer simplistic personal reflections about the problem that are not thoroughly grounded in the literature.  This is by far the most common way students fail this assignment. Therefore your first task is to spend time in the library using Roadrunner search to find additional sources or upgrade your first attempt at writing your problem description.)

Second, instead of writing about the seriousness of the problem and building a case to show it should be more fully examined, they rush to present solutions to the problem. Problems in the field of education are very challenging and typically involve complex social, political, and financial relationships. They are seldom easy to solve and the first step is a thorough examination of the seriousness of the problem which gradually builds motivation and momentum towards making the demanding efforts that will have to be made to eventually solve the problem. In this course, we stop at demonstrating the problem is very serious and deserves additional investigation.

Third, they do not properly format their in-text citations and the related references at the end of their assignment. There is a lot to learn in this regard so all we are looking for is an honest effort to do so at this stage of your scholarly development.

You will learn more about how to effectively search the library as your journey continues. However, for now you should definitely explore the information found at the following link. It will help you immensely as your journey continues. Try to give the information the time and attention it deserves, there is a lot to learn and it is very important to your future success in your program. What is Roadrunner Search?

A typical scholarly problem statement would look something like this. However, all sources that are represented are fictitious. Also, this is a very brief example intended primarily to illustrate how thoroughly you should support each key claim using in-text citations.

Scholars are amassing growing evidence of the devastating effects of school bullying (Adams & McDonald, 2018; Marshall, 2019, Samuels & James, 2017). The primary debilitating effects of aggressive school bullying include diminished academic achievement (Campbell, 2016), social isolation (Williams, 2018), and depression that has the potential of leading to suicide (Olson & Campbell, 2018). Adams and McDonald are adamant that schools need to be more aggressive implementing anti-bullying programs but the schools in school system XYZ have made limited progress in this regard. A robust investigation of school bullying and various research based anti-bullying programs is in order (Mellum & Walthum, 2017). As leaders in a school system we cannot remain uninformed about the causes and solutions to the bullying epidemic in our schools.

The definitive guide to properly formatting in-text citations begins on page 253 of the 7th Ed. of the APA manual with specific examples beginning on page 262.  Click the links below to see clear examples of what in-text citations look like.

http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2011/01/writing-in-text-citations-in-apa-style.html

Learning how to develop properly formatted references for in-text citations is a challenge for many students. Here are some sample references so you can see what they look like. Many students find it helpful to save these and use them as a quick reference when developing their references for future assignments. A good place to save them would be your Personal Writing Checklist. Notice the list of ten points about various formatting issues that follows the examples.

Brophy, J. E. (2015). Teacher praise: A functional analysis. Review of Educational Research, 51(1), 5-32.

Ilies, R., & Judge, T.A. (2014). Goal regulation across time: The effects of feedback and affect. Journal of Applied Psychology, (90)3, 453-467. doi: 10.1037/0021-9010.90.3.453

Nelson, B. D., Jackson, F., Amir, N., & Hajcak, G. (2017). Attention bias modification reduces neural correlates of response monitoring. Biological Psychology, 129, 103–110. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2017.08.059

Here is a ten point checklist for formatting references.

1. They are listed alphabetically.

2. They are presented using hanging indents. To create a hanging indent, use your mouse to highlight the entire reference and hold down the Control key while you press the “T” key. (This is a built in shortcut in Microsoft Word.)

3. The first and last names of authors are represented by initials.

4. The titles of articles only have the first word capitalized and the first word of the secondary title following the colon (if there is one) capitalized. If the title contains any proper nouns such as America or Chicago, they would also be capitalized.

5. The names of the journals are presented in italics and are capitalized.

6. The names of the journals are followed by the issue number, volume number, and page number. The issue number is italicized but the others are not. Some journals do not use volume numbers, just issue numbers. One clue to this is if the issue number is very large, often in the hundreds.

7. The abbreviation for doi (digital object identifier) is presented in all lowercase. The doi is not always available but include it if it is.

8. If there is more than one author, they are separated with commas but the last one is preceded by & instead of a comma.

9. Examine the punctuation used in all references.

10. Examine the spacing used in all references.

So you can learn more about APA formatting, NCU has provided all students with licensed access to Academic Writer (https://academicwriter-apa-org.proxy1.ncu.edu/). In the event you still struggle learning APA you may wish to purchase the 6^th Edition of the APA Publication Manual through Amazon or a similar book seller. I recommend the paperback version which costs about $30. Because of publication restrictions, NCU is not able to provide it to students.]

Summary of Which Resources I Used and How They Helped Improve My Writing

[The resources referred to are those mentioned in the syllabus for this unit that discuss good academic writing, not the sources you found in the library to help you support the key claims made in your problem statement. Try to identify at least three that you found to be particularly helpful and explain why you found them to be so. The syllabus says the length requirement for this assignment is only one page but please disregard that since you will need two or three pages for all three parts of the assignment.]

Conclusion

[Offer a brief two or three sentence reflection on what you learned about scholarly writing this week.]

References

[Here are some sample references so you can see what they look like. Many students find it helpful to save these and use them as a quick reference when developing their references for future assignments. A good place to save them would be your Personal Writing Checklist. Notice the list of ten points about various formatting issues that follows the examples.

Brophy, J. E. (2015). Teacher praise: A functional analysis. Review of Educational Research, 51(1), 5-32.

Ilies, R., & Judge, T.A. (2014). Goal regulation across time: The effects of feedback and affect. Journal of Applied Psychology, (90)3, 453-467. doi: 10.1037/0021-9010.90.3.453

Nelson, B. D., Jackson, F., Amir, N., & Hajcak, G. (2017). Attention bias modification reduces neural correlates of response monitoring. Biological Psychology, 129, 103–110. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2017.08.059

Here is a ten point checklist for formatting references.

1. They are listed alphabetically.

2. They are presented using hanging indents. To create a hanging indent, use your mouse to highlight the entire reference and hold down the Control key while you press the “T” key. (This is a built in shortcut in Microsoft Word.)

3. The first and last names of authors are represented by initials.

4. The titles of articles only have the first word capitalized and the first word of the secondary title following the colon (if there is one) capitalized. If the title contains any proper nouns such as America or Chicago, they would also be capitalized.

5. The names of the journals are presented in italics and are capitalized.

6. The names of the journals are followed by the issue number, volume number, and page number. The issue number is italicized but the others are not. Some journals do not use volume numbers, just issue numbers. One clue to this is if the issue number is very large, often in the hundreds.

7. The abbreviation for doi (digital object identifier) is presented in all lowercase. The doi is not always available but include it if it is.

8. If there is more than one author, they are separated with commas but the last one is preceded by & instead of a comma.

9. Examine the punctuation used in all references.

10. Examine the spacing used in all references.

So you can learn more about APA formatting, NCU has provided all students with licensed access to Academic Writer (https://academicwriter-apa-org.proxy1.ncu.edu/). In the event you still struggle learning APA you may wish to purchase the 6^th Edition of the APA Publication Manual through Amazon or a similar book seller. I recommend the paperback version which costs about $30. Because of publication restrictions, NCU is not able to provide it to students.]