00 Plan your study
In an original empirical study, you collect new data and analyze it yourself. It's the most work of any paper type and the most rewarding. Most of the hard decisions happen before you collect a single data point.
What it looks like
- Shape: abstract → introduction → methods → results → discussion → limitations → conclusion → references
- Length: 10–20 pages
- Common mistake: a sample too small to say anything. Decide how many you need before you start, and if you can't get it, say so honestly in your limitations.
A lab experiment, a survey, a set of field observations, and a coded set of interviews all count, as long as you gathered the data yourself.
Choose a design
Your research question decides the design. Pick the simplest one that can actually answer it.
| Design | What it answers | Student-sized example |
|---|---|---|
| Experiment | Does changing X cause a change in Y? | Randomly assign classmates to study with or without music, then test their recall. |
| Survey | What do people think, feel, or do, and how do those things relate? | Ask students about sleep and stress using an established scale. |
| Observational / correlational | Do X and Y move together in the real world? | Record water temperature and algae growth at a local pond each week. |
| Qualitative | How do people experience or explain something? | Interview ten student athletes about balancing sport and school. |
Only an experiment with random assignment can show cause and effect. If you run a survey or an observational study, say “is associated with,” not “causes.”
Name your variables
- Independent variable — what you change or compare (music vs. silence)
- Dependent variable — what you measure (number of words recalled)
- Controlled variables — what you keep the same for everyone (word list, time limit, room)
Then turn your question into a hypothesis
Does listening to music while studying affect memory?
High school students who study a list of 20 words in silence will recall more words after ten minutes than students who study the same list while listening to music with lyrics.
Exercise: fill in the blanks
- I will change or compare
- I will measure using
- I predict that
Decide your sample size before you start
Small samples produce results that could easily be chance. Decide how many participants or measurements you need before collecting anything, and write the number down.
- For a simple two-group comparison, a common rule of thumb is at least 30 per group
- Free tools like G*Power can calculate a more precise number for your design
- If you can't reach your target, keep going anyway — and say so honestly in your limitations
Get ethics right
If your study involves people, these are not optional.
- Get informed consent, and parental consent for anyone under 18
- Keep responses anonymous and store your data securely
- Let participants stop at any time without explanation
- Ask your teacher whether your school requires approval before you begin
- Test drugs, supplements, or anything that could harm a participant
- Collect names alongside sensitive answers
- Work with animals or hazardous materials without qualified supervision
Run a pilot
Try your whole procedure on two or three people first. You'll catch confusing instructions, broken timing, and questions that don't measure what you meant — while it's still cheap to fix them.
Build a timeline
Weeks 1–2 · Read and plan
- Background reading, research question, hypothesis, design
Week 3 · Prepare
- Materials, consent forms, approval, pilot test
Weeks 4–6 · Collect
- Run your study and record data the same way every time
Weeks 7–8 · Analyze and write
- Clean data, run your analysis, draft every section, then revise
01 Title page
APA 7 puts a running head at the top of every page, in capitals, with the page number.
RUNNING HEAD: SHORTENED TITLE OF STUDY 1
- Title of the study
- Your name
Music and Memory
The Effect of Background Music with Lyrics on Short-Term Word Recall in High School Students
A good title names your variables and your population, so a reader knows what you studied before opening the paper.
02 Abstract
A one-paragraph summary of the whole study. Unlike a proposal, an empirical study's abstract reports your actual results.
The formula
- The topic and why it matters
- Your research question or hypothesis
- What you did — design, participants, and measures in one or two sentences
- What you found — the main result, with key numbers
- What it means — the main takeaway
Many students study while listening to music, but its effect on memory remains debated. This study tested whether background music with lyrics affects short-term word recall. Sixty high school students were randomly assigned to study a 20-word list either in silence or while listening to music with lyrics, then completed a free-recall test after ten minutes. Students in the silence condition recalled significantly more words than those in the music condition. These findings suggest that music with lyrics may interfere with verbal memory, and that students studying vocabulary may benefit from a quiet environment.
Keywords: background music, working memory, word recall, studying
- Leaving out the results, or saying only “results are discussed”
- Citing sources in the abstract
- Writing more than one paragraph, or more than 150–250 words
- Introducing information that does not appear elsewhere in the paper
Write your abstract last. Once every other section is finished, you can summarize your own study accurately in one paragraph.
03 Introduction
Move from broad to narrow: the topic, what research already shows, the gap, and finally your question and hypothesis. In a short empirical paper, the literature review lives inside the introduction.
Funnel structure
1. The big picture
- Introduce the topic and why it matters — to science, to people, or to policy
- Name the real-world issue or problem your research speaks to
2. What we already know
- Summarize and compare the key studies, organized by theme, not paper by paper
3. The gap
- What previous research hasn't tested, has disagreed on, or has studied in a different population
- What makes your study different — or how it builds on what came before
4. This study
- Your research question, your hypothesis, and a sentence on how you tested it
- Any limits on scope — what you deliberately did not study
5. Roadmap
- One or two sentences on how the rest of the paper is organized
Several studies have found that background music can impair reading comprehension in adults (Smith et al., 2019; Lee & Park, 2021). However, few have tested whether this effect extends to short-term word recall in adolescents, who report studying with music more often than any other age group. The present study addresses this gap.
This study focuses on music with lyrics and does not examine instrumental music or other types of memory. The next section defines key terms and reviews relevant theory, followed by the methods, results, and a discussion of what the findings mean for students.
Theoretical framework
Before your methods, give the reader the concepts they need. In a longer paper this can be its own section; in a short one it sits at the end of the introduction.
- Definitions — define each key term exactly as you use it, citing a source
- Key theories — name the theory or model that explains your topic, and say which parts of it your study tests
- Previous research — keep only the studies and theories relevant to your question
Working memory refers to the system that temporarily holds and manipulates information. According to Baddeley's working memory model, spoken or written words are processed by a “phonological loop.” If song lyrics compete for the same resource, they should interfere with memorizing words — the prediction this study tests.
Use APA 7 for references and in-text citations, and cite every piece of information you take from a source.
04 Methods
Describe exactly what you did, in the past tense, so a stranger could repeat your study without asking you anything. These subheadings cover what most readers need.
Approach and rationale
Open with the approach you used — the design, model, or theory guiding your analysis — and explain why it's the best fit for your research question. If you analyze material against specific criteria or a model, name them here.
A between-subjects experiment was chosen because it allows a direct comparison of recall under two conditions while preventing practice effects from studying the same list twice.
Participants
Who took part, how many, how you recruited them, and any relevant details such as age range.
Sixty students (ages 14–17) were recruited from one public high school through classroom announcements. All participants and their parents provided written informed consent.
Materials
Every tool, instrument, survey, or piece of equipment you used. Name established scales and cite them. If your data is material rather than people — articles, social media posts, water samples — say what type it is, how much you have, and why that amount suits your question.
Selection criteria
Explain how you chose what to include and what to leave out, and how you collected it.
Students were eligible if they were 14–17 and fluent in English. Students with a diagnosed hearing impairment were excluded because the music condition required hearing the audio clearly.
Procedure
Step by step, what happened to each participant or sample, in order. Include how you assigned groups.
Participants were randomly assigned to a silence condition or a music condition. Each studied a list of 20 common nouns for three minutes, completed an unrelated puzzle for ten minutes, and then wrote down as many words as they could remember in two minutes.
Data analysis
How you summarized and tested your data — which statistics, which test, which software.
The number of correctly recalled words was compared between conditions using an independent-samples t-test in Google Sheets, with significance set at p < .05.
Not sure which test to use? Comparing two groups usually means a t-test; three or more groups, an ANOVA; two measured variables, a correlation; categories and counts, a chi-square test. Free tools like Google Sheets, JASP, or jamovi run all of these.
05 Results
Report what you found, clearly and without interpretation. Save the “why” for the discussion.
Include
- Descriptive statistics — means, standard deviations, percentages, and sample sizes
- The result of each test you said you'd run in your methods
- At least one clear table or graph, with a numbered title and labeled axes
- Results that didn't support your hypothesis — they're findings too
The music group did worse, which shows music is distracting.
Participants in the silence condition recalled more words (M = 14.2, SD = 3.1) than those in the music condition (M = 11.8, SD = 3.4). This difference was statistically significant, t(58) = 2.86, p = .006.
- Explaining or speculating about your results here
- Showing the same numbers in both a table and a paragraph
- Leaving out results that didn't turn out the way you hoped
- Saying a result “proves” your hypothesis — data supports or doesn't support it
Some papers, especially qualitative ones, combine results and discussion into one “Findings” section. If you do, present each finding and then say briefly what it means for your research question before moving to the next.
06 Discussion
Now explain what your results mean. Move from narrow back to broad — the opposite of the introduction.
Answer these, in order
- Was your hypothesis supported? Restate the main finding in plain words.
- How does it compare to previous research? Where do you agree or disagree with the studies in your introduction, and why might that be?
- What explains it? Offer reasons for your results, grounded in theory or prior work.
- What does it mean for the theory? Do your results support, challenge, or extend the theory from your theoretical framework?
- Why does it matter? Practical implications — who should care, and what solutions or recommendations follow.
- What comes next? Specific questions future research should test.
Consistent with Smith et al. (2019), music with lyrics was associated with lower recall. One explanation is that lyrics compete with the words being memorized for the same verbal processing resources. Future studies could compare instrumental music with music containing lyrics to test this explanation directly.
These results suggest that students memorizing vocabulary should study in silence or with instrumental music, and that schools offering study halls could designate quiet zones for this kind of work.
07 Limitations
Every study has weaknesses. Naming yours honestly makes your paper more credible, not less.
Consider
- Sample — size, and whether it represents the wider population
- Measurement — whether your tools captured what you intended
- Design — whether something other than your independent variable could explain the result
- Setting — whether results would hold outside your school, lab, or time frame
The sample was small.
All participants came from a single school, so results may not generalize to students in other regions. Future studies should recruit from several schools and include a larger sample.
For each limitation, say how it might have affected your results and how future research could fix it.
08 Conclusion
Bring the paper full circle. Remind the reader what you set out to do, then show that you did it.
Four steps
- Restate your aim and research question. Remind the reader what you set out to answer before you answer it.
- Answer it. Summarize your main findings and how they respond to the question.
- State your contribution. What your study adds to the field, including any solutions or recommendations.
- Point forward. How future research could build on where you left off.
This study asked whether background music with lyrics affects high school students' short-term word recall. Students who studied in silence recalled significantly more words than those who studied with music, supporting the idea that lyrics compete for verbal working memory. These findings extend previous adult research to adolescents and offer a simple, practical recommendation for students. Future research could test instrumental music, longer study sessions, and students from a wider range of schools.
- Introducing new results, sources, or arguments
- Repeating the introduction or abstract word for word
- Overstating what a single study can show
09 References
Always APA 7.
- Only include sources you actually cited
- Cite the scales, instruments, and software you used, not just articles
- In-text citations are required throughout the paper
Keegan, J. (1999). The First World War. Alfred A. Knopf.
10 Checklist
Run through this before you collect data, and again before you submit. Your ticks are saved in this browser.
Before you collect
The paper
The document