The Introduction to Psychology paper will require you to use your critical thinking skills and your writing ability to address a question of primary importance: How will you use psychology in your career? For example, how could psychology help you make decisions; stay motivated or improve your short-term memory. These are just two examples. You will need to determine what concepts best fit your career choice.
In order to be able to answer this question, you must be able to analyze and synthesize psychological concepts and be able to apply them to your speculations concerning your future career. In your paper, you will need to clearly identify your career and then explain how what you have learned in psychology will enhance your career.
You need to consider two concepts. The concepts you select must be from different chapters. When deciding what concepts to include, look at the Concept Map at the end of each chapter, and pick appropriate concepts. To be clear, you do not need two concepts from each of the chapters, you need a total of two concepts but they need to be from different chapters. Note, you must choose concepts, not broad topic areas. You are writing a paper, not a book so you need to make selections that are manageable. For example, trying to write about a topic as broad as “the brain,” would be too broad. You would need to narrow it down to specifics parts of the brain. Also, the different perspectives in psychology (e.g., behavioral, humanistic, psychoanalytical, neuropsychological, etc.,) are not concepts/topics. You need to be more specific.
Your paper will make use of at least three sources:
The first source is your textbook itself. You must include a proper in-text citation for information from the textbook and include the textbook on your reference page.
The second source may be a book or a website (refer to acceptable references).
The third source is an article from a refereed (peer-reviewed) journal (preferably published within the last five years) which addresses one of the psychological concepts or topics relevant to your intended career. You will want to find articles that are research (data-driven) based and that use the experimental or correlational method. The articles must have the traditional sections associated with a research study (abstract, introduction (literature review), methods, results, discussion, and references). That means no reviews of literature or other types of articles.
Examples of Unacceptable References:
• Wikipedia.org
• Ask.com
• About.com
• Encarta.msn.com
• Infoplease.com
• Answers.com
• A personal webpage of any kind. Personal web pages may contain inaccurate or poorly written material; they are not peer-reviewed.
• Student papers.
• A website that exists primarily to sell any product that purports to also include research about products sold on the site. (Examples–sites that sell vitamin supplements to cure diseases; sites that sell self-published books about anything, sites that exist to sell any services such as cosmetic surgery, EVEN IF the site is run by a licensed doctor.)
• Encyclopedias (online or in print).
Acceptable References:
• Professional organization websites and publications, such as:
• Sites that are .gov (government sites)
• Many (not all) sites that end in .org–however, be sure to thoroughly investigate the organization responsible for the site, including any possible bias.
• Online versions of magazines or academic journals. However, be sure to thoroughly investigate any possible bias of the publication (Having a bias does not make a source non-usable, but one must be aware of the bias of any site, especially political sites.)
• Books can be used but be aware that unless historical information is sought or information that does only rarely if ever go out of date, books generally do not include the most current information.
Professional Journals
What is a professional journal?
A professional journal is also known as a peer reviewed or scholarly journal. A professional journal publishes research articles by professionals in a particular field. Research articles are often lengthy and may contain tables and graphs.
What IS NOT a professional journal?
A newspaper article, an entry in a dictionary or encyclopedia, an article from a magazine (Time, Newsweek, Psychology Today, etc.) or an article you got from a website. (To access professional articles on websites, you usually have to have a subscription to the institution that publishes the journal. Some may be accessed for free, but usually it is the older back issues.)
