What is an abstract?
An abstract is a brief (usually one paragraph) summary of a research article. Its purpose is to allow the reader to decide whether to read the paper or not. A reader who does not want to read the paper should be able to read the abstract instead.
(Adapted from http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~baron/labrep.html)
What is the abstract assignment for this course?
Your job will be to find 5 articles of interest to you in the broad area of lifespan human development. They may be related to your own particular career orientation or personal interest. Since the articles must be from research journals, they likely will already have abstracts. Your job will be to read the articles and put the abstracts into your own words.
What should the abstract contain?
A good abstract will consist of 5 parts:
The citation (publication information about the article)
Statement of the problem
The method by which the problem was examined
The results of that examination
The conclusions reached in the process
Can you give us an example?
In the sample below, I have indicated those 5 sections by different colors.
Murayama, K., Pekrun, R., Suzuki, M., Marsh, H. W., & Lichtenfeld, S. (2015). Don’t aim too high for your kids: Parental overaspiration undermines students’ learning in mathematics. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 25(4), 112-115.
Previous research has suggested that parents’ aspirations for their children’s academic attainment can have a positive influence on children’s actual academic performance. Possible negative effects of parental overaspiration, however, have found little attention in the psychological literature. Employing longitudinal data from a representative sample of U.S. school children and their parents (N = 3,530; Grades 5 to 10), we showed that parental aspiration and children’s mathematical achievement were linked by positive reciprocal relations over time. Importantly, we also found that parental aspiration that exceeded their expectation (i.e., overaspiration) had negative reciprocal relations with children’s mathematical achievement. These findings suggest that unrealistically high parental aspiration can be detrimental for children’s achievement.
NOTES:
- If you are used to including a DOI number for articles retrieved online, you can include it at the end of the citation. Or you can just include the link to the article.
- The abstract (especially the citation) should be in APA style. If you are unfamiliar with APA style, do not hesitate to let me know so that we can provide you some guidelines.
