APA (American Psychological Association) Style

APA (American Psychological Association) Style is a format for academic documents such as course assignments, research papers, journal articles, and books. APA Style covers how academic papers are to be formated including in-text citations, end of text references, headings, etc.

APA style is most commonly used to cite sources within the social sciences, including education. The format is formally codified in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, currently in its 6th edition.

A very useful and accessible resource for understanding APA Format is: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/

Proper referencing is a particularly important component of APA, because it can mean the difference between plagiarism and appropriate citations. As a teacher candidate, appropriate citations also demonstrate the depth of your knowledge related to educational concepts (showing that your insights go beyond your intuitive understanding of concepts).

When to cite (Princeton University, 2011):

The five basic principles are described below. However, the general rule is: when in doubt, cite. You’ll will never find yourself in trouble if you acknowledge a source when it’s not absolutely necessary.

Five basic principles of when to cite:

1. Quotation. Any verbatim use of a source, no matter how large or small the quotation, must be properly referenced.
2. Paraphrase. A paraphrase is a restatement of another person’s thoughts or ideas in your own words, using your own sentence structure.
3. Summary. Summary is a concise statement of another person’s thoughts or ideas in your own words.
4. Facts, Information, and Data. If the information is found exclusively in a particular source, you must clearly acknowledge that source.
5. Supplementary Information. Occasionally, especially in a longer research paper, you may not be able to include all of the information or ideas from your research in the body of your own paper. In such cases, insert a note offering supplementary information rather than simply providing basic bibliographic information (author, title, place and date of publication, and page numbers). In such footnotes or endnotes, you might provide additional data to bolster your argument, or briefly present an alternative idea that you found in one of your sources, or even list two or three additional articles on some topic that your reader might find of interest. Such notes demonstrate the breadth and depth of your research, and permit you to include germane, but not essential, information or concepts without interrupting the flow of your own paper.

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