Research Experiences Handout for Psychology

Research Experiences Handout for Psychology 1113

What is the Research Requirement for Psychology 1113?

Understanding the nature of research and how it is conducted is an essential part of learning about psychology. Students in this course are required to obtain first-hand experience with research.

You may use one or more of the other methods of fulfilling the research requirement – reading/summarizing research articles or attending/summarizing research presentations (also called colloquia).

• Research Papers. A second means of fulfilling the Research requirement is to write a review of a research article. To earn research credit, you will select and read one article from the past 5 years from the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science and write a 500-word review of that article. Credit will be assigned based on satisfactory completion of the 500-word review and the page length of the reviewed articles. Written reviews of articles:

• up to 6 pages in length will earn 1.0 credits;

• such that each additional 3 article pages earns .25 research credits.

• Your instructor will demonstrate in class how you can use the library databases to obtain free copies of articles from this academic journal. Your review should include: a statement of the topic investigated and a statement of the hypotheses; a description of the procedure used to test the hypothesis; the most important results; the researcher’s discussion of the results; any implications of these findings; and any limitations of the study. You must provide a PDF copy of the article. Submit the review as an MS Word document and the copy of the article to the Canvas dropbox for your section.

• For colloquia, to earn 1 credit you must prepare and submit a 500 word summary of the colloquium as an MS Word document to the Canvas dropbox for your section. Your instructor will announce eligible presentations/colloquia throughout the semester. (If you know of a colloquium that might be of interest, be sure to bring it to the attention of your instructor.) Your summary should include the title of the presentation, the speaker’s name, and the date and location in your paper.

Note that these reviews and summaries are writing assignments and all of the standard policies regarding academic misconduct and plagiarism apply. All reviews and summaries will be submitted to TurnItIn.com, the anti-plagiarism website has adopted. If you submit a review or summary that contains plagiarism of any sort, it will be considered a violation of the University’s Academic Integrity policy. See the course syllabus for more information about academic integrity violations.