Research paper

Propose an experiment on infants’ or children’s cognitive development.

max length. 8 double-spaced pages, 12pt Times New Roman font, double-spaced,   1 inch margins (2.54 cm). You don’t need extra spacing before/after paragraphs. The length limit doesn’t include title page, references, tables, or figures.  Also, you don’t need an Abstract.

I recommend having 3 major sections

• Introduction
• Methods
• Potential Results and Discussion

Introduction

Introduce the topic and why it’s potentially interesting and important.

Review and discuss relevant findings from 3-5 papers you read. It’s okay to cite more papers if you actually read them. Make sure that at least 3 papers are experimental (not just reviews).

Introduce the specific question that your proposed experiment will investigate. If it follows-up on previous work, say so.

Give readers a sense of why the question matters. Readers always want to know what’s at stake.

Methods

This section can have subsections like Participants and Procedure.

If you think a Materials subsection would be useful, include it. But it’s usually unnecessary.

This section should be written in future tense, as if you were really going to run the study. e.g., “I will test 100 children aged 3 to 5”, “Children will first be shown…”

Feel free to create a Figure that shows what happens in your experiment. Figures can really help readers understand what’s going on.

Potential Results and Discussion

Here you can say what your experiment might find. There is no need to discuss the exact nature of the statistical tests you’d run. But you can describe the kinds of comparisons you’re interested in.

Tip 1: You can describe one possible outcome of your experiment, but you’re also free to raise a couple of possible outcomes.

Tip 2: For each potential outcome you describe, it helps to say what it would mean, why it would matter, etc. Don’t just stop after saying “The experiment might find X…” Go on to say more about it, e.g., “If so, this would suggest that…”You could even discuss future questions that would arise if a certain pattern of findings was observed.

Tip 3: You can make figures to show the possible outcome(s) of the study. Again, figures make things a lot easier to understand.