Your paper should summarize fundamental issues, questions, and controversies and provide a general overview of the topic. To accomplish this, you will have to use a minimum of five recent research articles (published within the past five years) to illustrate relevant points. You may use any of a number of electronic databases to find research articles that deal with your topic, including the library and the Internet. The one requirement for your selected research articles is that they must have appeared in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. (You may wish to consult the library staff or your instructor to determine whether a particular journal is peer-reviewed.) You may not use the course text or newspaper or magazine articles as one of your five references, but they are sometimes useful when they lead you to an appropriate research article. Avoid simply repeating the articles in summary form; use them within the text of your paper to illustrate important points. This paper should focus on current research, as opposed to background information that could be found in a textbook.

Your paper is to be seven to ten pages, or about 1,800 words, in length. It must be typed, double spaced, with one-inch margins, and fully referenced in the format specified in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (see http://www.apastyle.org/index.aspx). Check the Course Schedule in this syllabus for the due date.

The text of your paper should be preceded by an abstract (about 100 words) that summarizes the key points in the paper (i.e., a statement of the problem, major findings, and conclusions).

The paper will be graded on content, organization, and writing mechanics and style. The following rubric will be used to assign points associated wit