A scholarly research paper focused on either learning or cognition, of 6 to 8 pages in paper body length (not including the cover page or references page), double-spaced with 1" margins on all sides of each page, is required for this course. APA style formatting is required. The assignment should include a title page, abstract, body of paper, and a separate page entitled "References" listing sources used and attached to the end. Papers not in APA format will receive a 10% deduction from the paper score before scoring deduction for other errors. Papers not including any source citations will receive a score of zero. A minimum of 5 articles must be used in the development of the paper and source credited in the paper body and reference page. 10% times the number of articles less than 5 will be deducted from the paper score before scoring deduction for other errors.

Only academic, peer-reviewed journal articles obtained through the APUS Online Library can be used for the research paper. The articles should be no older than 10 years. Students should not assume that all sources available in the Online Library are academic in nature and suitable for this assignment. Like any library, the APUS Online Library contains a number of commercial publications. A good clue that an article is scholarly is that it comes from a publication produced by a professional academic organization, such as the American Psychological Association, and has the name "Journal" in it. Wikipedia and otherencyclopedias, online dictionaries, answer supplying websites such as WebMD.com, About.com, Ask.com and Answers.com, which do the work of synthesizing information for readers, newspapers, magazines and textbooks cannot be used for the paper.