This assignment is worth 40% of your total mark for this course.
Length: 2500 words including headings, sub-headings, in-text citations, and quotes. The word limit excludes, the reference list, footnotes, appendices, figures, and tables. The word limit will allow a tolerance of 10% and any work after the maximum word limit will not be included within the allocation of marks. In other words, the marker will STOP reading at 2750 words.
PSYC3000 Advanced Research Methods & Statistics In Psychology Lab Report – Australia.
Overview:
Your lab report should introduce your research area of interest and provide a rationale for your experimental design and hypotheses. It should give details of the methodology used and present the results of your findings. Finally, your report should conclude with a discussion of your findings with links to past research, and ideas for future studies.
The lab report is an individual assignment. Although you worked in a research team to create the experiment and collect data, each group member should be presenting a lab report on a unique research question. You should acknowledge that your experiment was part of a larger project, but you do not need to include details about aspects of the experiment that are not relevant to your research question. That is, if you did not include a particular measure in your analyses and it is not relevant to your research question, you do not need to introduce it in the introduction or include it in the Measures section of your Method.
How Not to Plagiarise in this Assignment:
You may use sections from your research proposal and it will not be counted as plagiarism. However, do not simply copy and paste the entire proposal. Over the last 6 weeks you will have read additional papers and your understanding of the research area will have increased such that you will be able to rewrite much of your introduction at a higher standard and the increased word count will enable you to cover past literature in more depth than you used for the proposal. Although elements of your experiment will overlap with your group, because each team member has a different question, you should not be sharing Method sections.There are a limited number of ways to say “A 2×2 ANOVA was conducted…” or “A multiple regression was used…” and these short common phrases will not count as plagiarism. In your Introduction and Discussion, make sure that you describe the findings from past research in your own words. Copying a sentence from a paper and tacking a reference on the end is still plagiarism, as is copying a sentence and swapping out just a couple of synonyms. Read through the Tips document in the Assessments Folder on Blackboard for some examples.
Lab Report Components:
A lab report consists of an Abstract, Introduction, Method, Results, Discussion, References, and sometimes Appendices. This lab report will include an additional component based on your SONA experience that IS NOT INCLUDED in your overall word count.
Abstract:
The abstract should be a concise summary of your report. It includes a general statement on the background and purpose of the study and the specific aims of the research. Next, you provide a sentence or two on the methods used and the results of the experiment. The last few sentences provide your interpretation of your findings.
Introduction:
The Introduction starts on a new page. It provides a broad overview of your topic area and defines key terms. Next, it introduces any relevant theories and literature that lead to the rationale for your study/research question and ends with your specific aims and hypotheses.
PSYC3000 Advanced Research Methods & Statistics In Psychology Lab Report – Australia.
Method:
The Method is broken into several subheadings.
Participants is where you present the number of people who participated, where they were recruited from, outline any inclusion/exclusion criteria, talk about any incentives etc
Measures is where you give details about the tasks/test/questionnaires that you used in your study. If you used an experiment you should talk about the stimuli that were used, and gives an overview of the experiment. If you used questionnaires you should talk about what the questions were about and provide their reliability/validity with references. If you added some demographic type questions, you should also mention them here. You can use subheadings for each measure to help organise this section.
Procedure is where you talk about what the participants did (not the things you did as the researcher to create the study) and the time that it took.
Research Design and Data Analysis is where you describe your variables and research design along with your planned analyses.
Results:
The Results is where you present your findings but without interpreting what they mean. You should start by and talking about any data cleaning that you did or any combining of scores to create scales etc. Next, you should include descriptive statistics for your measures along with the inferential statistics. You might decide to present your data in a table or figure to make it easier for your reader to understand.
Discussion:
The Discussion is where you summarise your results in plain English (without statistics) and decide whether your hypotheses were supported. You then interpret the results and compare and contrast them with past research findings. You should think about whether there are any alternative explanations for what you found. You should also discuss any limitations of your experiment and provide ideas on how future studies might overcome these limitations. It should end with a concluding paragraph.
SONA Experience:
Write a brief self-reflection on your SONA experience including your experiences as both a participant and as a researcher.
PSYC3000 Advanced Research Methods & Statistics In Psychology Lab Report – Australia.
References:
The reference list should start on a new page and be in APA format. It should include all the articles that you referenced in your report, but not papers that you read but didn’t end up citing.
Appendices:
The Appendices are used if you want to provide the reader with a copy of something that might be relevant such as the questionnaire that you used, or a copy of your experiment code, etc.