Carol Gilligan

DEVELOPMENTAL PAPER DETAILS
You will be assigned with a key figure in developmental psychology, whose ideas you will cover in more depth than what had been covered in class or in the textbook. This 8-10 page paper is due at the by midnight on November 30th.
Topics Assigned Feb 7th
Assignments and Deadlines
Early Sources: 5% of the paper grade, due Feb. 21st
You must provide me with at least 5 possible reputable sources. These are sources that have have come from academic or professional organizations, or primary sources such as interviews or works by your psychologist.
This DOES NOT include Wikipedia or random websites like GoodTherapy or VeryWellMind.
Wendi Birkhead will go over how to find reputable sources with us. If you are not sure if a source will count as reputable, you should ask me before you turn it in. These do not have to be your “final” sources, as it may turn out later that some aren’t useful or you need more information.
The point of this deadline is to help you begin your literature review and ensure that you are finding proper academic sources.
You must provide a properly-formatted APA (6th edition) citation for each of these sources. If you are unsure how to format an APA citation, you will usually be able to find an automated citation if you are using research databases. You will still need to check to make sure that this is correct, since the software often makes errors. Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (OWL) has excellent citation guides. For non-standard sources (such as TV interviews), searching for the APA blog on google can sometimes help.
Annotated Bibliography – 10% of the paper grade, due March 4th
Your annotated bibliography with at least 5 sources is due Wednesday, November 14th.
These must be reputable sources. They do not have to be the 5 you turned in earlier, in case you needed more info or found that some were not useful.
This will be an informal annotated bibliography. You will need an APA-style reference for each of the 5 sources.
After each citation, you could include summaries, notes, quotes, things you found interesting or important points – things you can draw on for your paper. They can be in paragraph form, sentences, bullet points, whatever. This is just a place for you to gather useful info so that you don’t have to constantly go back to sources when writing (if you don’t want to).
You don’t *need* a specific form for each source of those (e.g., you might have a paragraph summary about one source and bullet points for another), but you do need SOMETHING for each source. – If all you can come up with is “this source isn’t useful”, find a different source!

Your annotation should match the nature of your source and explain how the source is useful to your paper. If your source is a biography, summarize what it says about their life. If the work is about their theory or research, make sure that you are able to summarize their theories and mention their findings if those are reported.
If you have any concerns about the article’s motives or methods, please include that in the evaluation. (See Critical Thinking Below).
You don’t have to use all this info in the final paper, but it is better to have it than not.
These summaries/notes must be in your own words. It is ok if you bring over a quote in addition to your summary, but you must also include your own thoughts about the article. If you just copy-paste the abstract, that is not your own thoughts, and I WILL catch it.
First Draft – 10% of the paper grade, due April 3rd
You need to turn in at least 4 completed pages and an outline of how you plan to fill out the rest of the paper. This will show that you have a good understanding of the person’s work, and that you are writing effectively about it. It will also allow me to give you feedback before you must turn the paper in.
Research Paper – 75% of paper grade, due April 24th
For the focus of your paper, I want you to tell me the story of this researcher’s ideas: Where they started or were inspired, how their ideas developed as they conducted research or advanced their theories, and the legacy of their theories today. Your paper should definitely include:
– A brief biography of the figure including what may have inspired their research or ideas. (~1 page)
– A summary of any models/theories they developed and important research discoveries. (~4 pages)
– Critique and further development of their ideas by later researchers. (~ 2.5 pages)
– A conclusion covering their impact on the field of developmental psychology, both good and bad. (~.5 pages)
Think of your audience as one your classmates in this course, someone with a general understanding of psychology but who has not encountered your topic at all.
Notes on Your Conclusion and Critical Thinking
Just because I am assigning you this person DOES NOT mean that their ideas were 100% correct. When you are reading this person’s ideas and later critiques of their work, I expect you to think critically about what you are reading. Even a person with the most interesting and influential ideas will have blind spots. People criticizing or modifying those theories later might point out legitimate flaws, or they may have other motives. (Often, both are true.)
No matter who you are reading, try to keep this in mind. Is the person you are reading citing evidence? What kind of research methods do they use? Your conclusion is going to be partially based on your opinion, but that opinion should be based on the amount and strength of the evidence you have discovered.

Structure Stuff for Paper
This is minimum of eight (8), maximum of ten (10) double-spaced pages, not including references.
– This is 8 pages of full, double-spaced text. Not including the reference page, not including a title page. Pure text, to the bottom of each page. Do not add empty lines into your paper.
– Too short is bad. -15 points bad. Get your text to the bottom of page 8.
– If you go over 10 pages, I will stop reading at the bottom of page 10.
Regarding direct quotes (short or long quotations):
– Good reason to use a direct quote: It is particularly poignant or offers insight into the character of the people, research, or ideas you are talking about. Since this is a paper about biography and big ideas, you’ll probably come across some really elegant or interesting comments.

– Bad reason to use a direct quote: It concisely summarizes plain, factual information. In these cases, you SHOULD be paraphrasing it – putting it into your own words and then citing where you found it. (I don’t care if someone else understood this well enough to explain it, I care that YOU understand it.)

– Even for good quotes, use them sparingly. It can be kind of a grey area which category a quote falls into. It’s ok to make some mistakes here as long as you’re not bombarding me with quotes.
Minor APA in-text citation advice:
APA requires your works cited page to be in a specific format, but there is also a set way to give credit within the text of your paper.
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_formatting_and_style_guide/in_text_citations_the_basics.html
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_formatting_and_style_guide/in_text_citations_author_authors.html
– For each paragraph including facts or ideas that aren’t your own, you must provide a citation. (This is going to be almost all of your paragraphs.)
– Try to place a citation in a paragraph at the first sentence you present a fact/idea from that source.
– If you only have one source in a paragraph, you don’t need to repeat the citation, you only need that citation once + at each direct quote. Until you go on to the next paragraph.
– Citations for direct quotes need the page number, or paragraph number for sources without page #s – (Author & Author, 1999, p. 99) or Author and Author (1999) said “things” (p. 99).
– If there is more than one source in a paragraph, repeat the citation if you are going back and forth between sources – e.g., “Author X said blah (cite x). Author Y said bleh (cite y). But author X also said bleigh (cite x).”
Other stuff: 12 pt Times New Roman font, double-spaced, APA citations and reference page (do NOT put in your whole annotated bibliography).
No title page, no abstract.
Place at least your title and name on the first page (It’s ok if you put the course, my name, date, etc.)
Please use a header with a short title and the page number, do not put your name in the header.