APA Style: Formatting Figures

When formatting a figure, call out the figure in your text and make sure to include the figure number and a title with a legend and caption. Keep the following ideas in mind:

1. Number all figures sequentially as you refer to them in your text, 
2. Keep the title brief but descriptive

This design causes the note-taker to deliberately regulate several cognitive tasks simultaneously (Piolat, Olive, & Kellogg, 2005) and allows for the interaction of long-term memory schemas with the new material brought into working memory (Paas, Renkl, & Sweller, 2003). Note-takers have to regulate their comprehension of what is being read (asking questions such as: do I understand what I am reading) and select what they judge to be the key ideas and details that should be written/typed into the notes section. As seen in the box-and-whisker plot in Figure 1 and the explanations below it, this hypothesis was confirmed. (excerpt from Evans & Shively, 2018)

Figure 1. Box-and-Whisker plot of reading comprehension scores (N=101). Boxes enclose the middle 50% of values or the Interquartile range; the “X” in the box indicates the mean for each group;  extending lines indicate the top 25% and bottom 25% of values; outliers are indicated with dots.