Tips, How to Reference an Appendix Using the APA Format?

APA format is a very specific type of format and writing style that's used for various types of academic and research-based papers, essays and reports. Generally, APA format is reserved for papers and reports that relate to scientific fields and research. The papers are broken up into various sections that lend themselves to research, such as methods, results and recommendations. Papers written in APA format also usually include an appendix that it references throughout the document.

Instructions

1. Create an appendix following the Reference section at the end of your paper. This is where you will add information such as charts, graphs, and pictures, and anything else that would take up too much space within the paper. By doing so, you can get essential information across to the reader without interrupting the flow of the writing. Label each appendix as Appendix A, Appendix B, and so on, so that readers will know where to look based on your citation. (See Reference 2, pg. 400.)

2. Use an appendix in situations where you need information to back up a point you are trying to make. Referencing an appendix too early, however, can break up your introduction by taking your reader away from your writing before she's had the chance to become engaged in what you are trying to get across. (See Reference 2, pg. 400.)

3. Cite your appendix in-text according to the proper APA format style. This should be written following the sentence where you lead into the information that the appendix contains. For example, you might write something along the lines of "More than half of the city voted for the Republican candidate, while only 31% of the city voted for the Democratic candidate." The citation is then written in after that sentence in parentheses, such as "(See Appendix A)," where it would than lead them to a chart in the appendix that lists the percentage of votes that all of the candidates received. (See Reference 1, and Reference 2, pg. 400)

4. Explain the information in the appendix after you have cited it. As the reader returns to the text, you'll want them to be able to make sense out of what they just flipped to the back to see and why it was important for them to see. Adding on to the example in the previous step, you might go on to explain why each candidate received the amount of votes that they got. (See Reference 2, pg. 400).

Tips, How to Transfer From a Public to Private High School?

There is an on-going debate about the benefits of private education over public education, but whatever the reasons you choose a private high school over a public one, there are a few obstacles you may need to overcome. Public high schools receive government funding and have to accept everyone, where many private schools pick and choose people from certain demographics for their student population. The process may seem overwhelming, but staying organized can make a huge difference.

1. Decide which private school you want to transfer to from your high school. There are independent schools, parochial schools and proprietary schools. There might be constraints based on previous test scores, grade point average or tuition affordability. Independent schools tend to be the most expensive, whether they board or not, and parochial schools tend to be the least expensive.

2. Obtain admission materials from the private high school. This is something you want to do early in the school year, so you can apply for the following year. Some places require even earlier application. Keep a day-planner or a list so you do not miss any deadlines.

3. Send in your application forms to the private high school and take any admissions tests or standardized testing required by the private high school.

4. Apply for any scholarships, grants or financial aid you may need to cover your tuition and other costs or fees for the private school. Admissions Quest and the National Association of Independent Schools both have lists of scholarship and grant programs to help people who might need financial aid. Your new private school also might have financial aid available for students in certain circumstances.

5. Make sure the credits you already have can transfer over. If some do not, you have to take extra classes or may be able to "test out" of those credits.

6. Ensure the public high school sends your transcripts and records to the private high school. The schools may work this out on their own, but following up helps you get the peace of mind of knowing it is taken care of. It also makes you look professional and mature to the private school.

Just a few recommendations

No fire and/or brimstone about anything or anyone this time, just some credit where credit is due. (A slightly different version of this entry can also be found on NACAC's website at Admitted Blog)

Coming from the college side of college admission, I didnҀt realize how much counseling was involved in college counseling until I started meeting with students and their parents, their divorced parents, and/or their divorced and remarried parents; with students who refused to meet with their parents in the room, with parents who refused to meet with each other, and with children who refused to speak in their parentsҀ presence. (I wonҀt mention the times I had to ask parents, as politely as possible, to let their children get a word in edgewise or to review their records a bit more objectively as they considered college possibilities.)

I quickly realized I had stepped into a cultural maelstrom, especially at my very highly competitive school. ӀCollegeԀ affected everyone day to day, so knowing the mechanics of the process was only the beginning. Attending to psyches and personalities in the throes of college selection kept me plenty busy.

Now that I work with adults who counsel low-income and first-generation students, IҀm in a whole different arena, but the goals are the same. As a result, I often rely on two organizations that have significantly shaped my college-counseling outlook: the National Runaway Switchboard (NRS) and the American School Counselors Association (ASCA). NRS taught me how to listen actively and enable students to express themselves; ASCA has provided an essential framework for joining counseling and college counseling.

IҀve volunteered at NRS, a teen crisis line, for over ten years. ӀLinersԀ complete an extensive training that teaches them to listen actively, help callers develop options, and, most important, put callers in the ӀdriverҀs seatԀ as they talk through the reasons they ran away or want to. As a result IҀm committed to Ӏguiding without steering.Ԁ (I didnҀt know how much IҀd incorporated this methodology until one of my students who had been through the NRS training came in and asked I thought about his college list. ӀWell,Ԁ I replied, ӀWhat do you think about it?Ԁ He laughed and said, ӀAww, Mr. Dix, you donҀt have to do that NRS stuff with me!Ԁ)

The ASCA addresses primary and secondary school counseling topics. Its Ӏstrengths-basedԀ perspective means being alive to studentsҀ potential and reaching out to students, especially valuable in first-generation contexts. It informs my sessions with counselors and teachers.

Two ASCA publications are important reading: ASCA School Counselor magazine and the Professional School Counseling Journal. The former is for a generalized readership; the latter is ӀresearchԀ oriented (not always rigorous) but full of excellent commentary from practitioners and academics. (Here is one particularly helpful article. For the full publications you need to be an ASCA member.)

The ASCA also has just published two new reports in conjunction with the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) and the College Board: "A Closer Look at the Principal-Counselor Relationship" and "Finding a Way: Practical Examples of How an Effective Principal-Counselor Relationship Can Lead to Success for All Students" that are worth taking a look at. They are publicly available for download here.

My college counseling, as well as my professional development opportunities for colleagues, has benefited immensely from these resources. I highly recommend them.

High School, College Admission, and Class

The following post is a book review I wrote for the NACAC online book review section. It was published in August, 2008.

Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education
By Peter Sacks
University of California Press
$24.95, 373 pages (incl. notes and index), hardcover

Reviewed by Willard M. Dix
Executive Director, College Access Counseling

The college admission Petri dish grows many strains of the American Dream. Mixing aspiration, class-consciousness, education, social and cultural expectations, adolescent psychology, family dynamics, and financial complexity, it produces wildly varying results. Until recently, the formula seemed simple: ӀmeritԀ plus financial wherewithal plus extracurricular prowess equaled entr退e into the hallowed halls. But social and cultural awareness over the last 30 years has shown that formula to be more complex than once thought, and its effects more pernicious than the Dream would dictate.

In his new book, Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education, Peter Sacks looks at issues of class using the high school to college nexus as his laboratory. Combining solid research with portraits of young people and one educator struggling against classրbound issues, he asks us to consider that issues of class, as much as of education, have a significant impact on those striving to better their circumstances in American society.

Crashing the party
Sacks argues that Ӏclass is the grand organizing principle of American educationԀ and as such it works against those not already in the middle- or upper-middle classes. He challenges us to rethink the simplistic assumption that education by itself is a way for non-elites to enter the middle class. Educational Ӏstandards,Ԁ for example, often cater to those already capable of meeting them, rather than encourage othersҀ achievement. As a reverse example, he profiles Oceanside High SchoolҀs Dayle Mazzarella, Ӏa dangerous man,Ԁ who developed a successful program that opened advanced courses to students once considered incapable of succeeding in them. Sacks calls the San Diego teacher someone who is Ӏcrashing the exclusive party that American higher education has becomeԀ because he dares to assume that non-elites can achieve the same success of their more privileged peers if only they are challenged and supported properly.

Public and Private Commitment
Although this portrait and others in the book help bring the theme of class and education into focus, they are not as compelling as SacksҀs look at how higher education seems to be becoming more, rather than less, a bastion for elites and more adept at serving private, rather than public (read societyҀs) interests. He notes that Ӏa mere three percent of the freshmen enrolled at the nationҀs 146 most selective institutions came from the lowest socioeconomic quartileԀ in a 2004 study, while Ӏ almost 75 percentŀcame from the highestŀquartile.Ԁ In another, it was found that ӀoneҀs social background ׀particularly oneҀs fatherҀs education ׀proved to be just as powerful as academic merit in predicting the selectivity of the college one attended,Ԁ and that, in fact, that power has doubled over the years from 1980 to 1992.

At a time when a great deal of college rhetoric focuses on serving more lower-income and first-generation students, the facts seem to indicate otherwise. Sacks quotes a recent study contrasting university endowments with the number of students receiving Pell Grants on campus: Many of those with the healthiest endowments had the fewest Pell recipients: Harvard (6.8 percent), Princeton (7.4), Washington University in St. Louis (8) and Wake Forest (7) being among them. Even more unsettling are the records of state institutions, designed specifically to provide education for the public good. He finds that the University of Michigan, for example, while increasing its overall prestige through greater selectivity and claiming to pay more attention to Ӏsocio-economic diversityԀ actually slashed its Pell Grant enrollment in half between 1992 and 2002. It and other similar institutions seem to be abandoning their commitment to the greater good in favor of chasing institutional prestige, a worrisome development that threatens their social role as developers of the middle class.

At the gates
Sacks believes that we should work harder to make American education the leg up to the middle class we envision it to be. He celebrates the Ӏrabble rousersԀ and Ӏgate crashersԀ already doing that work and in the final chapter makes a few suggestions for action that would bear much more development. Tearing Down the Gates is in fact more polite than radical, spotlighting the intersection of class, privilege, and education and prodding us to a wider consideration of how they ought to work. The battle has not yet been joined, but, as Sacks notes, Ӏfor any educational reform to really happenŀAmerica will have to confront its class problem.Ԁ By putting high school education and college admission in this context, Sacks has significantly moved that discussion forward.

The More Things Change...

Acceptance and rejection letters are out for this year and the usual articles about how it's never been harder to get into college and so on have been coming out like crocuses at the first sign of spring. As I've noted before, this isn't really news, it's just a repeat of articles from the last 10 years with different numbers, and of course we always have the details of rejected or waitlisted students being astonished that they didn't get into their "dream" schools, how much the pressure is getting to them, and so on. Focusing on colleges and universities whose acceptance rates seem to be approaching zero, the ultimate exclusivity (not may idea--see Doonesbury from a few years ago), media make it seem as though legions of rejected students will soon be roaming the streets in their ragged cardigans, homeless shades doomed to walk the earth without any cozy campus to call their own.

Of course, this is nowhere near the real picture. Just about everyone who applies to college will get in somewhere; quite a few colleges even (mid-April 2008) now are still accepting applications. The whole thing is only a problem if you care very deeply about where you attend and think that if you don't go there your life is somehow ruined, destroyed, or otherwise diverted from its true course and flowering, all of which is nonsense.

A colleague and I were talking the other evening about our own college research and application processes, laughing at our callow approach to the whole thing. She and I are contemporaries, so we're talking about the early 70s, before the whole thing got really out of hand. We were both clueless, to be honest, even though we were both good students. I was head of my class at a large public high school in Chester, NJ, which offered honors but no AP classes that I can recall (not a big thing then), and I did well in the honors track, although to this day I consider calculus my mortal enemy. I had what today would be considered so-so SAT scores (no I'm not telling, although to my chagrin I still know them), and a decent although not spectacular career in the chorus and the theater group. I also worked part-time at the local pharmacy, working the counter and making deliveries all over the area.

When college came on the horizon late in my junior year (although my family always told me I could go anywhere I wanted when the time came), we had no special seminars, no offers of essay help, no test prep, no piles of glossy viewbooks, no "college counselor." I figured I'd apply to Harvard and Yale simply because my uncle, whom I greatly admired, had attended the former and taught at the latter; I briefly considered Tufts, my father's alma mater, but since he was an engineer I thought it was a school for engineers, so I dismissed it. There was no "strategizing" to it; I was just going with what I knew.

One day, going by my guidance counselor's office, I heard him call to me and ask what I was thinking about college. I told him, and he said that was fine, but had I ever considered a small liberal arts college? I asked what that was and he said a good place to get an education but smaller than a university. That seemed fine to me so I asked him to name a few. "Well, Amherst, for example," he replied. I'd never heard of it, but I was willing to check it out.

I don't remember what I knew about Amherst (it wasn't much) before I got on the Peter Pan bus in New York for the four hour ride to Amherst, MA later in the summer, but when I got off in the town center, I swooned at the New England charm and the compact yet spacious Amherst College campus. I thought, "This is what college should look like!" I walked around by myself, coming without warning on the spectacular view of the Pioneer Valley from Memorial Hill, after which I was completely overcome with desire. I dropped in on the admission office, which at the time was tucked away in the main administration building. I was smitten without having seen a student, professor, or admission office person. I asked about interviews. I didn't need one, I was told; by the time I returned to New Jersey, I was ready to apply.

The time came and I applied to Harvard, Yale, and, at random, Ithaca College in upstate New York. I applied to Amherst early decision, still intoxicated with the thought of lounging on that hill, or simply being there, reading, surrounded by nature. Hell, even the trees seemed intelligent. I wanted to ingest it all. But once the applications were in I went on with the rest of my high school life. (I don't remember what I wrote my essays on, but I do remember that I didn't get any help that I recall. My mother may have given them a quick read, but not much else--no English teacher or counselor help.)

Ithaca accepted me almost immediately, it seems to me. Harvard and Yale turned me down, which was OK by me, especially when I recalled my "group interview" at a Yale's alum's home. A group of applicants sat around a table and an admission person spoke with us after we had each had a chance to speak with one of the Yale alums who had gathered for the occasion. The home was elegantly appointed, perhaps even lavish; it seemed like a mansion to me and it made me uncomfortable. But what I really remember is the girl who said, "I understand Yale has a burgeoning film department." I made a face, probably, groaning inside at her pretentious use of a big word to impress the dean. It was then I decided I didn't want to go to Yale, although I learned a new word that day.

Amherst deferred me, making my guidance counselor, David Boelhouwer, crazy. He couldn't understand it and called to see what had happened. Turns out, you did need an interview if you applied ED and lived within 250 miles of campus. He managed to wrangle an interview for me over the Christmas break with the Dean himself, the legendary Ed Wall. I went back to campus, courtesy of my aunt, who drove me out from Acton MA in a snowfall and waited while I had my session. I remember being disappointed that Dean Wall didn't ask me anything about my grades or accomplishments; instead he asked what I was reading and I told him The Wheel of Love, a story collection by Joyce Carol Oates. We talked about that. What was even more frustrating was that I didn't even like the book, and during the whole interview I could see the snow coming down harder and harder and the light fading and it was a long way back to Boston.

Afterwards, Dean Wall took my puny hand in his massive bear grasp and told me it was nice to meet me. Despite my disappointment, I stopped at Hastings in town and bought an Amherst sweatshirt, which I resolved not to wear unless I got in. My aunt picked me up and we drove back to the Boston suburbs.

The day I got into Amherst was the only day in my school life that I cut a class. My mother, who had been in a terrible auto accident over New Year's 1973, had needed a nurse during the day, and I would take over when I got home. Consequently I was able to have a car at school. When the letter arrived, she called the school and I got called to the office. She wanted to open it. At first I said yes, then changed my mind. I rushed out of school, hopped into our VW Bug and zoomed home, where I found the acceptance letter. I celebrated a bit with my mother, ran upstairs and put on the sweatshirt, and raced back to school, in time to catch the end of my German class. Mrs. Kerekes, a stern but fair Hungarian, started to scold me, but when she saw the sweatshirt, she started beaming, and all was forgiven.

So I got to Amherst, but here's the punchline--to this day I don't think I even knew that Amherst was all male until I actually got to campus. (It went co-end in 1976, one of the last schools of its kind to do so.) My whole experience of college search and application was a fluke arising from a casual comment by my counselor. I'm sure that if he'd said "Williams" or "Union" or "Hamilton" or "Calcutta" I'd be one of their alums today. Total chance. And I'm also convinced that I owe Joyce Carol Oates credit for my admission. Even today I feel guilty about not reading everything she writes (which would, of course, be impossible for a mortal with only 24 hours a day to read...)

So back to my colleague and me sitting in an Irish pub in downtown Chicago. Her story, in its similar lack of focus on "getting into" a particular college, is very similar to mine. And yet, here we were, laughing at our ignorance and marveling at the fact that we managed pretty well in spite of it, having survived and even prospered. Our lives are good, our work fulfills us, and we have good memories of our alma maters. Yet they were accidents! When I see today's high school students sweating, and planning, and conniving, and arranging their lives so they'll "stand out" starting even before high school, I have to wonder what it is they're really doing. It's not a bad thing to want to go to a particular place, but, let's be honest, it doesn't really matter where you go to college. The important thing is what you do once you're there.

I can already hear you saying, "Well, but what about the contacts, the smart kids who attend, the best professors, and so on?" I still say, it makes no difference, and to fret about it is a stress that's totally unnecessary. The contacts you make in one place are different but the same as in another--you find the people you need to find no matter where you are. You attend classes or not, you party or not, you start becoming an adult or not, no matter where you are. And with acceptance rates below 10 percent, those big deal colleges are doing other schools a favor by making sure they have a good supply of smart kids who end up fanning out all over the country. So do yourselves a favor and think that you could probably do just as well applying to colleges randomly as you could trying to predict and insure every element.

In the long run, we can't control what will happen no matter what we do or how much we'd like to. Why should applying to college be any different? The students with the least stress were the ones who came to my office and said, "You know, I think I'll be happy wherever I go." As the Chinese say, "Be careful how you travel or you may end up where you expected to." That's the spirit!

What About the Counselor?

I'm thinking now about the high school college counselor, who seems to be the Invisible Person in any hand-wringing articles about the difficulties and complexities of the college admission process these days. The HSCC, especially one in a tony private or well-heeled public school, has many masters but no real security. He or she is beholden to parents, students, administrators, college admission deans, and the process itself and if you're an HSCC and you feel that something's wrong or you're asked to do something not quite right you're in a real jam. And out you go.

I recall when my former school head was new. He made a great noise about how we were a "service" and as such we needed to give the customers what they wanted. I probably sealed my own fate about then when I replied that I might provide a service but I wasn't a servant. There's a big difference, in my mind, between being a counselor or a teacher and being someone who simply carries out the orders of others. While a college counselor has to carry out certain functions and is expected, rightly, to support his students and so on, there are also things that a counselor should NOT do, including running after students to apply to college (at least after those who should know better), reminding people more than a few times what they need to do, and so on. I was told more than once that I'd have to "keep an eye on" Johnny because he was too lazy to do things himself. Well, I have to figure that if Johnny needs that kind of scrutiny he's not ready to go to college anyway. So I failed at that one.

My point is that the HSCC brings his/her knowledge, intelligence, and understanding of kids, families, and colleges to this process and should not be treated as a doorman. We have an understanding of the complexities of the process and frankly I got tired of having people continually second guess me when they knew so little about the whole picture. Yet there was no one to whom I could lean on, since my former school was dedicated strictly to getting its students into the schools they wanted to get into, no matter how mediocre they were in the big picture. So I probably gained a reputation for not being supportive enough, and not being sympathetic enough. But, hell, I just couldn't sympathize with the mother who cried in my office because her kid had to go to Tufts instead of Brown, and seemed to expect that I should pick up the phone and make some kind of fuss. Nor could I work myself up to answer the phone on a Sunday night when a tearful parent called to say the world seemed to be crashing in because her son hadn't gotten into Harvard (this after my cautions that that would probably be the case). It could wait, really.

So you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. And if you complain publicly about what you consider to be questionable practices of colleges (encouraging applications in junior year, for example), you can get hammered even if you're within your rights as a NACAC member who reads the rules and has a legitimate issue. HSCCs seem to be cowed constantly by colleges, emailing me privately when I pointed out something on the listserv, supporting my position but telling me they dare not say anything publicly. That's not right. People talk about collegiality but if one side can't really protest something the other does, then the balance of power is unbalanced. Something needs to be done about that.

HSCCs should be able to speak up about issues as well as students, and they should be able to tell pain-in-the-ass parents where to get off without having to worry about their jobs. I'm not talking about just general annoyances; I'm talking about those whose expectations are far beyond reality and who are warping their children in the process. I'm talking about the colleges that continue to sneak deadlines earlier and earlier and try to exert more and more pressure on students to apply and enroll. HSCCs should have some kind of immunity from all the swirling BS that goes on when they are doing their jobs and really trying to stand up for their students in realistic ways and for the integrity of the process. We should be able to speak plainly when we have to.

I think there should be some kind of service like Consumer Reports or some way for HSCCs to report problems or injustices in a way that enables them to speak freely and openly without fear. Schools and colleges should sign on to that. I've thought about creating something like the website Stained Apron, where waiters and waitresses gripe about customers. It's a letting-off-steam site and I'd want to try something that might get some positive results, but over the years I've heard enough that I think the position of the HSCC needs to be given a little more clout and safety. Sometimes, like teachers, we have to do things we'd rather not, like deliver bad news rather than stroking egos, and we shouldn't be punished for that.

I'm just glad to be out of the ego-stroking world and in a world that can benefit more from what I have to offer. I'm glad to be working with counselors and students who need guidance and appreciate it when they get it. I'm happy not to hear the blubbering of parents who think Tufts is so inferior to Brown it's worth blubbering over. I'm glad to be released from the straitjacketed, constipated community of self-serving egos who think they have a right to whatever they wish for. Boo hoo to you.