Psychology Homework
Paper Option to Substitute for Experimental Participation
You may earn experimental participation points by reading and summarizing research articles published in psychology journals. Each article that you read and summarize must be handed in to your instructor, who will determine whether or not your summary is acceptable.
Copies of journal articles can be found on Blackboard. A list of articles is listed at the end of this document. Please refer to the list when choosing your articles. ONLY articles from that list are acceptable for summary.
Paper schedule:
To spread the workload out over the entire semester, 4 submission periods have been established for the papers. You can submit up to two papers in each period. Hence, if you want to do 8 papers, you would submit two in each period. Note that you cannot "make up" missed papers by doing additional papers in a later period - only a MAXIMUM of two papers can be submitted per period (unless approved by your TA). Hence, to be safe, it is to your benefit to start by doing 2 papers per period - that always leaves open the option of doing all 8 papers. If you decide that you don't want to do all 8, you can always cut back later in the semester.
Completing the papers is easy. Your papers should include answers to some of (but not necessarily all of) the following questions:
Introduction section:
1. What is the overall purpose of this study?
2. Why was the author conducting this experiment?
3. What theory is the author testing in this research?
4. What is the author's hypothesis?
Method section:
1. How were subjects selected for this experiment?
2. What were the subjects' ages, gender, and other characteristics?
3. What were the experimental conditions used in the experiment? Please describe with detail.
4. What were the control conditions used? Please describe in detail.
5. What were the independent and dependent variables?
Results section:
1. How did the researchers score the dependent variables?
2. What types of statistical analyses were used?
3. What did the statistical analyses indicate?
4. How significant were the results?
Discussion section:
1. Did the results of the experiment support the experimenter's hypothesis?
2. How did the author summarize the outcome of their experiment?
3. Were there results of the experiment that were inconsistent with the researcher's initial hypothesis or theory?
4. Can you relate this article to a section of the textbook, or explain why this is important to that particular area of psychology?
Format your homework according to the give formatting requirements:
1. The answer must be double spaced, typed, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides.
2. The response also includes a cover page containing the title of the homework, the course title, the student's name, and the date. The cover page is not included in the required page length.
3. Also include a reference page. The references and Citations should follow APA format. The reference page is not included in the required page length.