Final paper, journal and abstract

Your paper should be 7-15 pages in length, double-spaced. It should follow a standard format:

1. Introduction (your field setting, the organization, supervisor, what you set out to learn/research, etc.)
2. Some discussion of the field setting (any reading you did preparing for the practicum, and how it affected your research proposal); I will likely assign you some reading, and you should be looking as well. Include all reading materials in your documentation of time, and as a list of references cited both in text and in a bibliography at the end of the paper.
3. The method(s) you used to make observations / collect data / achieve your learning objectives and a description of how you conducted your analysis to make sense of your observations/data;
4. I would also like you to incorporate some statistics into your paper. This could have to do with department budgets. It could be something about how the agency / organization is used (no. of cases, clients, etc.), but you need to put some thought into what statistics you use, what they mean, and why they’re important to include. Also into how you’re presenting them.
5. Results and Discussion: What you learned (personally, professionally and sociologically)
   1. How well you think you met your objectives (I’m more interested in the truth here, so if it hasn’t gone as you expected, that’s okay—learning isn’t always predictable);
   2. What advice you might have for future capstone students (this is your audience for the abstract—think about what it might been useful for you to have known going in).

If you’ve kept up with your journal, your observations and interpretations (your research), and been guided by the objectives you began with, writing the paper should be fairly easy. I will expect that the paper is structured around the research/learning objectives you identified early on. After all, they were …. learning and research objectives. Your final paper is due Tuesday of finals week. You need to turn in three things:

1. The paper
2. Your journal (use pseudonyms when describing people)
3. An abstract, 300-500 words, describing what you did. This is very important! I want you to write this abstract for a specific audience–future students who might be interested in doing the practicum you just finished. The abstract can be turned in as part of the paper. These may be shared with students (so keep that in mind–it will be quasi-public–any criticisms should probably be in your paper, use the abstract to describe the kinds of things you did during the term).