Education Term Paper

Many education courses, particularly upper-level or graduate education courses, will require learners to write a lengthy education term paper as the culminating assignment of the course.  This paper is intended to synthesize secondary research on a focused topic with the student's knowledge about the course subject to produce a scholarly text that is properly contextualized in the larger field of education.  Education term papers will often be assigned to invite students to demonstrate their knowledge of the course subject as well as to suggest how that knowledge can be actively applied in an educational setting.  Because education is an applied discipline, the type of term paper one would compose for an education class will likely be quite different from a term paper composed for a more theoretical discipline.  Education term papers will likely always need to discuss theories, practices, and concepts in a way that ties them to actual application in the classroom.  In this way, they will likely utilize an abundance of real or hypothetical examples and situations.

Research will be a large component of any education report.  Many universities have education libraries devoted to compiling sources exclusively dedicated to the study of education.  These are the best resources for researching an education report.  If such a library does not exist on the writer's campus or somewhere nearby, then the learner will need to focus his research in the main university library's education section and perhaps solicit help from a reference librarian in order to obtain texts from other institutions.  

When doing the research, learners should pay careful attention to the publication dates of the texts they are reading and citing.  Education is a field in which much research is being done and published annually; theories change, best-practice ideas fall out of favor, and new methods are introduced.  Therefore, learners should pay close attention to when their sources were published in order to ascertain how dated the research may be.  Some older texts are still completely relevant and central to the field; some are not.  In general, learners should favor works published in the last five to ten years unless (1) their document is focusing on a historical aspect of education that would require the inclusion of older texts or (2) an older text is a seminal work in education that is still widely regarded as a leading source in the field.

Most education term papers will be written in APA style unless otherwise directed by the course instructor.  For details on APA style, learners should reference the APA Style Manual.

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