WCCC Library: Journal Article Assignment

The purpose of the journal article assignment is for you to learn how to find peer-reviewed articles and then be able to understand the articles you find.

You are specifically looking for an article that has been written about a study that has already been conducted. 

When a researcher wants to conduct a formal study of something, they often have to write a report so that their work and findings become part of a larger body of information. 

Think about that. 

What is the point in conducting a formal study if other people in your field of work don't know about it?  This is why they have to carefully write this report. 

Then, to share their findings with their peers and other people (such as students) who will want to learn about their findings, a researcher will create a shorter version of their report and work to get it published in a academic, peer-reviewed journal. 

These are the articles you are looking for.

The articles you use should have at least some of the following elements:

• An identified purpose for the study (usually found within the first couple of pages)
• Methods section (how they conducted the study)
• Participants section (who were the participants)
• Results section (lots of statistics)
• Discussion section (what do the results mean related to the purpose of the study)
• Conclusion (recommendations for future study)
• A bibliography (References)

When you are writing your journal article assignment, please refer to your professor's instructions.  But generally, you will be summarizing and paraphrasing the article itself, which will require APA in-text citations.  

You will need to use the WCCC Library’s databases to find these articles.  Here's a short video that shows you how to access and use the databases.

When it’s time to write your response to the assignment, you will be using APA.  This means you will not only cite the article in APA, but you will also use APA formatting. 

This includes:

• A specific APA cover page
• A “References” list with references in APA format
• Times New Roman or Arial font, size 12

For this assignment, you will only have one source and that is the journal article itself. Here is information on how to cite articles from the WCCC database.