Paper 2 Assignment
(due Tuesday, May 4)
This paper will be written on an experiment you develop on topic of your choice.
The purpose of this assignment is for you to develop the design for an experiment to answer some empirical question that you have formed, and to communicate the details of that study in a full scientific paper. (You will not actually carry out the study, this is just a proposal with hypothetical data).
Getting Started:
1. Think of topic in Psychology that you have found especially interesting. Think back to other courses you've taken and make a list of the areas you found most fascinating. (If you remember having questions on these topics, jot them down and see if they are empirical questions that could be answered with an experiment.)
2. Or think of some behavior you have observed that has led you to question the causes or consequences. (after all, the study of psychology is to determine the factors that influence our behavior). For that behavior or situation, go to your psychology textbooks and see if you can find any information talking about the topic. If not, then try searching for experiments that have been done on the topic in the PsycINFO database (online through the library webpage--see other sheet for info on how to use the database).
3. Begin to narrow the topic down. Look through your old textbooks that describe specific experiments on the topics in classes (or from your observations) you found interesting. Read over the general information in your textbooks so that you have a general understanding of the topic before you look at more specific articles. If any of the experiments in the textbook are particularly interesting or questioning, find the reference for that article in your text and go find that article to read in the library.
4. Use the PsycINFO database (online through the library webpage--see info sheet on the class webpage for info on how to use the database) to search through the abstracts of published articles on the topic. Once you find a few articles that look interesting to you, you can go and locate those articles in the library's journal section and photocopy the articles to read. The library has most of the major psychology journals, but if you find an article that you really want and the library doesn't carry the journal, talk to a librarian about acquiring a photocopy of it through interlibrary loan.
5. Once you have read a few papers on your topic, write down any questions you have about their research or findings. At this point you should be thinking about different empirical questions on their research from which you could design an experiment.
6. Once you have formed an empirical question, begin thinking about how you could conduct a study to answer that question.
Note: You do not have to have an incredibly sophisticated or difficult topic for this paper. The important thing to be thinking about issues that raise questions for you, and to develop a sound experiment that will help answer those questions.
Requirements:
1. Written in APA
2. Must be a single factor design with at least 3 groups. Your dependent variable must be a quantitative (not qualitative) variable.
3. The design should be one that is answering a question you've developed that has not been addressed (i.e. the same experiment has not been done before). Partial replications of studies are ok, but you should be sure to specify what the differences are between your experiment and the other one, and why the changes in methodology for your experiment are important and what new question they are answering. Note that this requires you do some reading about the topic to discover what has and has not been investigated.
4. This is just a proposal for the experiment. You will NOT actually conduct the experiment.
5. The results section will be using hypothetical data that you make up. You must create a data set filled with raw data scores that you make up for each subject's performance in your task. You must analyze these raw numbers using the appropriate descriptive (central tendency, variability, etc.) and inferential statistics (one-way ANOVA) in light of your experimental hypothesis. You results section must have written description of the results in APA format, and a Figure (graph) in proper APA format. You must reference the figure from the results section. Make sure your graph is appropriate for the type of data you're using.
6. You must have at least 3 reference articles for background to the topic in your Introduction section, and the references must be from APA journals or from reputable journals that have a review process. Many webpages that discuss topics in psychology are not reviewed and often contain many unsupported claims. Remember you are to discuss the experiments described in the methods and results sections of those articles and are not to cite findings from articles in their Introductions that you have not read yourself. Information from textbooks is also second-hand and is not acceptable for one of the references.
7. You must turn in a photocopy of the full introduction of each article you reference with your paper (needs to be from the actual article, not just the abstract from the PsycINFO printout). (5 points will be deducted if you do not turn in the full introductions).
8. One topic per student, and no two students may work together on the same project (although you may certainly bounce ideas off one another).
Grading:
1. The paper will be worth 66 points.
2. The rest of the sections will have the following breakdowns:
Title Page & Abstract: 10% Results : 15% Introduction: 15% Discussion: 15% APA Style Overall: 10% Methods: 15% Figure 5% Writing Style
(clarity, organization, flow, etc.): 15%