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This may seem a bit odd because it’s not really a “paper” in the sense you’re used to which, yes, that’s correct. But the process here is actually the core process that is used by the majority of researchers as we begin our own studies: we have an idea, get some basic understanding of its scope, read some literature to get a handle on the state of the field and broader/deeper knowledge of the topic, and form some beginning hypotheses from this to get us grounded on what we actually know and what we want to know.
For your final paper, you will need to submit a document that contain the following sections. These should be formatted generally in APA style:
Double-spaced
Size 12 font
Times New Roman
Hanging indent/alphabetical references list
A cover page
remember to do the correct running head style
Page numbers
Make sure your name is on the first page
Regarding length: I’m less concerned with a specific word count than I am about thoroughness. You have 5 annotations that you are completing, which are often around 2/3 of a page to 1 page each (so, it’ll probably be around 3.5 – 5 pages in that section). The intro is somewhere between 1/2 and 1 page. And the hypothesis section is about a 1/2 page in length. This gives you a rough idea but content is more important than just having your paper be a certain length.
Paper structure
Simple Introduction
Your introduction should introduce the reader to the general aspects of your topic. In this, I want you to present that topic you’ve been interested in, noting a research question and the logic/reasoning that you’re interested in this topic. Additionally, you must include a point drawn from a trustworthy news source that gives some insight into the scale of the problem that you’re interested in. For example, if your paper is about college drinking, you’d want some sort of basic statistic that says what percent of college students drink (or, you could even fine tune it a bit further and do what percent of college students binge drink). This is so your reader/audience can understand and draw a sort of why is this an important topic. Make sure this is cohesive enough that the next section.
Annotated Bibliography (in APA format)
Rather than have you assemble a literature review that links your articles together, you will

need to do an annotated bibliography of your articles. For this, you will need a total of five academic, peer-reviewed articles. For these five articles, they can address the variables you’re interested in varying amounts. So, you could have two articles about race, only one on gender, and two on age. Each of annotations need to be a fully fleshed out annotated bibliography.
An important note is their annotation examples highlight a few different types including MLA, APA, and Chicago. The APA approach doesn’t include a reflection for using it in your own work (this is because the annotated bibliographies are meant to be a repository for your own use so that, if you’re writing another paper in the future and think you want to use a reference again, you can review your own notes to see if it’ll be useful). For this project, I want you to use the MLA approach to annotations: “a summary, an evaluation of the text, and a reflection on its applicability to his/her own research” (The Writing Lab, 2017). All five must have these 3 sections.
Hypotheses
The last items that I want you to develop in this are a set of three hypotheses built from the literature. So, you’ve already spent some time on your articles and thinking about your topic and variables over the week. You’re going to end the components of this by articulating specific hypotheses from the literature you just assembled that would guide your own research. You don’t need to go into heavy or long explanations on this but the when your reader/audience sees your hypotheses, the annotations they just read should prime them on these. Basically, do these hypotheses connect to the annotations that I just read or do they seem to come out of left field.
Descriptive Statistics – Graphical
This section should include general, descriptive statistics for your subject that graphically present summary information that is important. You want think about it like: a line graph that shows the adoption cell phones over time or a pie chart that shows the percentages of different groups, etc.
You should have two graphical representations here.
References
And, finally, a full references list that is correctly formatted. Remember, this will have six entries (your five articles and the background source from your introduction).