When writing a research project, remember that the goal is to use the ideas and information you find in sources to support your own ideas. Make sure that each of your supporting paragraphs does three things:

Consider this paragraph from Patrick O’Malley’s proposal in Chapter 7, “More Testing, More Learning”:

The main reason professors should give frequent exams is that when they do and when they provide feedback to students on how well they are doing, students learn more in the course and perform better on major exams, projects, and papers. It makes sense that in a challenging course containing a great deal of material, students will learn more of it and put it to better use if they have to apply or “practice” it frequently on exams, which also helps them find out how much they are learning and what they need to go over again. A 2006 study reported in the journal Psychological Science concluded that “taking repeated tests on material leads to better long-term retention than repeated studying,” according to the study’s coauthors, Henry L. Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke (ScienceWatch.com, 2008). When asked what the impact of this breakthrough research would be, they responded: “We hope that this research may be picked up in educational circles as a way to improve educational practices, both for students in the classroom and as a study strategy outside of class.” The new field of mind, brain, and education research advocates the use of “retrieval testing.” For example, research by Karpicke and Blunt (2011) published in Science found that testing was more effective than other, more traditional methods of studying both for comprehension and for analysis. Why retrieval testing works is not known. UCLA psychologist Robert Bjork speculates that it may be effective because “when we use our memories by retrieving things, we change our access” to that information. “What we recall,” therefore, “becomes more recallable in the future” (qtd. in Belluck, 2011).

O’Malley connects this body paragraph to his thesis by beginning with the transition The main reason and by repeating the phrase perform better from his forecasting statement. He synthesizes information from a variety of sources, and doesn’t merely stitch quotations and summary together; rather, he explains how the evidence supports his claim by stating that it “makes sense” that students “apply or ‘practice’” what they learn on frequent exams, for example.