proposal

Example: Title for Your Assignment of Paper

Your Name

Example: Title for Your Assignment of Paper

In this document I will describe and model some of the essential features of APA formatting that I would like for you to adopt in your own assignments. Please note that it is key that you have a basic understanding of these principals, as your compliance with these standards will be incorporated into your grade. You may use this pre-formatted document as a template your own assignments. You will also likely need to refer to the additional APA guides that are included in the syllabus.

Before getting started you will notice some things about this paper. First, everything is double-spaced. Second, margins are 1-inch wide on all sides. Third, there are several headings that are used throughout the document to separate different parts of the paper. Fourth, page numbers are included at the bottom of each page (the title page and references page to do not count towards your total page length). No extra spaces are made or typed between any sections of the paper.

This first section of your paper is the introduction. The introduction does not have its own header. Instead, the title of the paper is listed above. The purpose of your paper should be clear from the introduction. The meat of your paper, however, will follow the introduction and will probably require multiple levels of headers, from level 1-3 (or maybe 4). Headers provide a 2-3 word summary of the content that will be included in the paragraphs following.

Headers in APA

The Level 1 headers are used to break out different sections of a paper. They look like this:

Level 1 Header

For example, in a research paper, you will have multiple parts (i.e., a part on the history of special education, a part on the role of a general education teacher in supporting students with disabilities, a conclusion, etc.). It would be wise to use level 1 headers to break your paper into these sections. After you use a level 1 header, it re-starts your header levels so that the next header would be a level 2, then a level 3, etc.

Level 2 Header

Level 2 headers indicate sub-sections that fall under the previous level 1 header. You may have many or a few level 2 headers. So for example, if one of your level 1 headers is

The History of Special Education

You might have several level 2 headers like these:

Early 1900s

Advocacy and Civil Rights Era: 1950-1960

The Right to Appropriate Education: 1975 and Beyond

Level 3 header. The level three header is a little different than the first level header because it is indented a half-inch, has a period after it, and only the first word is capitalized (unless it’s a proper noun). It also differs in that text follows immediately after the period. When writing a paper and using level 3 headers, you would want the level three header to be a sub-heading for the level 2 header. An example of this might be that a level 2 header is the “Early 1900s” where you provide a short description of the state of special education in the 1900s and indicate that in the following paragraphs you are going to talk more specifically about the types of special services that were being provided in the 1900s (e.g., services for those who were blind or deaf, institutions, etc.). You would then include a level three header for each of those services identified.

Level 4 header. In the event that you need an additional header (i.e., you wanted to specifically discuss the types of institutions in the 1900s), you would then use a level 4 header. You’ll notice it differs from a level 2 header only in that it is italicized.

Level 5 header. This is what it would like if you feel you need even one more header. I tend to not use these unless I’m going into extreme detail about a topic.

Citations

One of the most important parts of writing an assignment in this course is giving credit to those who give you the ideas that you will be writing about. The way that you do this is by citing others work. The APA has a very specific way of citing sources in text. Articles and books are cited the same way in text. For example, an article written by Bronfenbrenner (1994) and a book by Solomon (2012) are cited the same way. Both of these citations only include the authors’ last names. Sometimes, citations are better set inside parenthesis. For example, I might purport that the ecological model suggests an individual is nested within a system (Bronfenbrenner, 1994). Or, that there are a variety of risk and protective factors that have been shown to influence the long-term outcomes of individuals (Werner, 2005). Sometimes, you’ll use a website or a source without an author. When this happens, you will give credit to the organization that is sponsoring that material. For example, recent statistics suggest that individuals with disabilities are employed at a rate nearly half of that as individuals without disabilities (U.S. Department of Labor, 2013). If a source is cited in your text, you must also include a reference for that citation in the final references section of your paper

References

After the last page of the document you will include a reference page. See the example in this document to see what this will look like. You will need to refer to the resources suggested on the syllabus for more information on properly referencing a source.

Conclusion

In conclusion, using the APA format is going to be essential for this class and there are many more intricacies that I discussed in this brief write-up. Using this standardized grading scheme will reduce my own bias that I project on assignments that look prettier than others. It will also be a basis on by which your assignment is graded.

References

These are examples of APA formatted references:

Bronfenbrenner, U. (2004). Ecological model of human development. International Encyclopedia of Education, 3(2), pp-pp.

U.S. Department of Labor (2013). Persons with disabilities Labor force characteristics summary. Retrieved from: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/disabl.pdf

Werner. E. (2005). Resilience and recovery: Findings from the Kauai longitudinal study. Research, Policy and Practices in Children’s Mental Health, 19(1), pp-pp.