Assignment:
Assignment Instructions
Part 1: Personal Experience
1. Describe how you personally felt after going through your chosen treatment. Did you experience a reduction in stress? How do you know? How long did the effects last?
2. Studies show that stress reduction benefits increase with regular use. How likely are you to continue with either daily exercise or practicing mindfulness meditation on your own? What are the potential benefits? What could be the challenges of continuing this routine?
3. Do you think the other stress reduction technique (the one you did not personally do) would work better or worse for you than the treatment you did? Why?
Part 2: Experiment Conclusions
1. Copy and paste the graph you created here.
2. Summarize the results of your data analysis as seen in your graph. Did exercise reduce stress? Did mindfulness practice reduce stress? Which one was more effective?
3. Using at least one source, (be sure that this is a credible source, be sure to include both and in-text citation and a full citation in your works cited). write a short paragraph about how the stress response might be altered by either exercise or mindfulness meditation (you may pick either the one you did or the one that was more effective). Did the results of our experiment agree with this explanation? Why do you think this might have been the case?
Part 3: Experimental Design Critique
The goal of this research study is to understand how effectively exercise and/or mindfulness meditation reduce stress levels. An important part of any research study is assessing the significance of the results -- How much can the results be generalized?
1. Name at least one variable that we did not control while conducting this experiment (a variable that we did not measure). Explain what it was and how it could have affected the results.
2. Identify at least 2 potential limitations of this experiment, considering factors such as the duration of the study, sample size, use of controls, demographics of participants, and measurement protocol. Explain how each of these limitations might affect the interpretation and generalizability of the results. (You may find it helpful to review the Scientific Claims SoftChalk as you write this response.)
3. If you were to conduct another study to test this hypothesis, how could you improve the study design? Explain at least two changes that you would make and why they would improve the quality of this study from a scientific perspective.
4. What new question(s) do you have based on your findings from this class experiment? Explain. You must list at least one new question.