L3a - Introduction I

Activate Learning

Read the 1st paragraph of the Introduction article and comment on what are the characteristics.

There should be about 1 characteristics that you and your team mates can identify easily.

Promote thinking and discussion

The purpose of the Introduction / Literature review of your research paper is to give you the information to understand why your experiment turns out the way it does.

As a rule of thumb, this section accounts for about 10% of the total word count of the body of a typical research paper, or about 400 words spread over three paragraphs in a 4000-word paper. With that, let us now understand how to write the Introduction section step-by-step:

1. Provide background information and set the context. This initial part of the Introduction prepares the readers for more detailed and specific information that is given later. The first couple of sentences are typically broad. Below are some examples:

Dragonflies and Damselflies are well-studied group of invertebrates (Cordoba, 2008) with their increasing recognition in conservation worldwide (Samways, 2008).

At the same time, the introductory statement should not be too broad: note that in the example above, the Introduction did not begin by talking about using dragonflies and damselflies as bio-indicators. Instead, the general statement that dragonflies are involved in conservation.

Once the first sentence has introduced the broad field, the next sentence can point to the specific area within that broad field. As you may have noticed, the mention of dragonflies and damselflies as the only insect group that are being studied by IUCN.

In a regional context, this fact is reflected in dragonflies and damselflies as being the only insect group that are currently being globally assessed by the World Conservation Union (IUCN, 2009).

Get into your project groups and discuss how your 1st paragraph should look like.

Facilitate Demonstration of Learning

After your discussion, pen down the 1st paragraph in your research project.

Monitor and provide feedback

Your teacher will provide you with the feedback of 1st paragraph the INTRODUCTION section after you have submitted your proposals for review.