Format for the APA Research Paper last installment...Conclusion and Discussion

Conclusion

             Your conclusion is based on your results and this is where you can make explicit the logical connections between your hypothesis, the methods you used, and the results that you found. This is where you evaluate and interpret the implications of your findings.

You can begin this section with a clear statement of the support or nonsupport in your research for your original hypotheses. Professor Haiduck mentioned that many of you are researching very original topics, and there might be very large gaps in research material available to you. This is where you can evaluate those gaps and propose ways in which that missing information can be filled. If you found research that ran counter to your hypothesis, you might want to offer explanations for that here. Similarities and differences between your results and the work of others should be used to contextualize, confirm, and clarify your conclusions.

Discussion

In this section you can make additional comments on the importance of your findings. Just make sure that you restrict this commentary to its relevance to your topic and the research you have done. Make sure that you do not over-generalize or make claims that are too broad, or that are tangential to your original hypothesis and research.

You might also want to return to the discussion of why the problem is important (as stated in the introduction), and what are the larger implications of your findings.  Any additional, miscellaneous information that you think is relevant but did not fit in another section can be discussed here. Just make sure that it fits logically with the rest of your paper.