Education majors fall under the social science umbrella. This is also true of majors like psychology, communication, social work, and museology. Thus, I’d need to use the IMRaD format when writing papers, especially research papers. In fact, I’ve already written a research paper using IMRaD format for my EDUC 245 class; my researched question involved ADHD. As someone with ADHD siblings, it was the most natural topic for me.

IMRaD papers, in case you’ve forgotten from the readings, has different sections for the introduction (or abstract), methods, results, and discussion. So, the ‘a’ in IMRaD comes from ‘and.’ While writing my paper, I found that the style of IMRaD papers flows well and divvies up the information into digestible quantities.

As far as language goes, I have found it’s a good idea to use qualifiers, like the book mentions. Words like ‘might,’ ‘could,’ and ‘likely’ fit into this. In general, social science papers should be concise and formal. This means broad adjectives, like ‘super’ and ‘very,’ should be avoided since they are not specific or precise enough to be presented as factual. It’s easy for the mind to drift away from precision; I often find that the longer I try to focus, the more my paragraphs look like my unfiltered train of thought threw up on the Google Doc. So, I know it’s important to know what words to avoid, so when I edit my papers, I know what words to swap out, or trash altogether.

Regarding types of reference, education majors should end up using APA in the classes for their specific majors. APA applies to many of the social sciences.

It’s very important for college students to understand how the different parts of SLR applies to them personally. We’ll all be taking more and more classes for our specific majors as time goes on and will need to know how to write appropriate papers for our fields of study. Researching that information now is best because by the time we’re consistently writing papers of our field’s style, we should already be familiar with the structure, language, and reference will need to use.

These are the websites I looked at to figure out what field education falls under and more about writing under the social science umbrella: https://guides.lib.uw.edu/research/citations/citationwhich. https://libguides.usc.edu/writingguide/academicwriting#:~:text=IV.%20Language%20The%20investigation%20of%20research%20problems%20in,to%20follow%20your%20line%20of%20thinking%20without%20difficulty.

The images are from educationcareerarticles.com/education-articles/majors-overview/information-on-masters-degree-programs-in-social-science/ and https://trends-worldwide16.blogspot.com/2021/04/format-of-imrad-thesis-example-of.html.