699POA

Week 3 Plan of Action – Integrated Review Outline During Week 3, your Action Plan will focus on crafting a detailed outline of your integrated review paper. This will be your road map to help you craft a focused, thorough review. Your Integrated Review Outline should be in sentence outline format. While it is expected you will adapt and revise your plan as you progress throughout the course, this week you should begin fleshing out the ideas and main points for each section of your paper.

Click here to visit the APUS Writing Center for additional guidance and examples for structuring a sentence outline: http://www.apus.edu/apus-library/resources-services/student-academic-resource-center/writing-center/the-writing-process.html to give you a sense of the general format of a sentence outline. Your outline should include the main ideas or points you would like to make for each of the following elements:

Thesis/Topic Statement (1 point)

Introduction (5 points)

• Background (Why is this topic of interest? What do you know about it already? What do you hope to gain from your review? What is its history or relevance to the field of psychology?)
• Definitions (What are key terms you are running across in your review of the literature so far that will need defining for your readers? List them here and begin looking up good definitions for inclusion in your final paper.)
• Identification of four core areas (Reiterate the 4 areas/courses you identified in your topic proposal here.)
• Relevance of each area to overarching theme (Explain how the four areas overlap and relate to your general topic for the integrated review.) 

Literature Review (8 points)

• Study summaries (Start plugging in studies you have discovered, basic notes and details, methodologies, key information, etc. Key headings for this section for each study might be: purpose, research question/hypothesis, methods, participants, findings, relevance to topic. You will continue to add to this section as you identify the rest of your articles in your annotated bibliography next week.)
• Similarities and differences among core areas and unifying themes (Begin noting where studies align and don’t align and identify key topics or themes you want to cover in your final paper here.)
• Conclusion (What conclusions can you draw so far or what questions do you plan to address/answer in your conclusion?)

Discussion (8 points)

• Synthesis of critical analysis of the literature (Reiterate common themes – what can you learn from what others have studied by looking at the whole picture?)
• New knowledge gained through integration of literature findings (What new knowledge have you or do you anticipate being able to generate based on your review? What can looking at the studies in the way in which you did add to our understanding of the overall topic?  

Conclusion (3 points)