In any piece of writing, there are the main ideas that are stressed out by authors so as to express the relevance or purpose of the piece. In the “ Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Vol. 12, No. 2, June 2012, pp. 23-38” by Nancy Van Note and Shrinika Weerakoon, titled “APA, Meet Google: Graduate students’ approaches to learning citation style”, the authors reports on the difficulties students have in formatting texts according to the APA system, and consequently also address why these same students find themselves unable to correctly use it.
Some of the main points which can be identified in the piece to elaborate what the authors want to report on include “Puzzled by the poor performance of talented students on routine exercise involving correcting bibliographic citations, we undertook a study of the reasons for these challenges (Van Note Chism & Weerakoon, 2012).” The authors recognize that there is really a problem-students make a lot of errors in formatting texts according to the APA system. But what then causes the said challenges? A study is done to find out and that is why this is a main idea.
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“In short, we wanted to know whether cognitive confusion, poor mental imaging, motivation, personal style, simple lack of practice, or some combination of these factors were to blame for APA citation style errors, (Van Note Chism & Weerakoon, 2012),” is another main point here. In this, the authors already have in mind some of the reasons as to why students may be having difficulties learning the APA system. This therefore, forms another important basis of the study and hence, we can consider it a main idea.
Another main point in the piece is “ Our explorations yielded important understandings on the thought process and habits that students used in routine APA tasks, “logical mistakes” they made, their understandings of their own thinking processes (metacognition), and preference for digital rather than print resources (Van Note Chism & Weerakoon, 2012).” The authors now come to know exactly why students have been having problems in learning and correctly applying the APA system of formatting. It is a main idea because it makes us understand the reasons for incorrect use of APA. The three main points are related in that in the first one, the author introduces the problem to us then goes ahead to propose some of the reasons behind the problem in the second one and later gives the results in the third one making us understand the real causes.
Reference
Van Note Chism, N., & Weerakoon, S. (2012). APA, Meet Google: Graduate Students' Approaches to Learning Citation Style. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning , 12 (2), 27-38.
