You can earn 10 points of extra-credit if you find a peer-reviewed psychology journal article directly related to a specific topic we’ve covered in this class and write a brief 300-word-long paper about the article that addresses the questions listed below. For example, you could use an article from the journal Psychological Science. You must use the PsychINFO database to find articles. The journal article cannot come from a newspaper (e.g., Orlando Sentinel) or mass-circulated magazine (e.g., Time, Newsweek, Psychology Today). Also, the journal article cannot be an article that you were assigned to read for this class (or any other class you are taking with me). Also, the article cannot be one that you used for your Experiment 1, Correlation Project, Experiment 2 or Experiment 3 papers. The rationale for this rule is that you must do something extra in order to earn extra-credit! 🙂
You can repeat this exercise for another article and write a maximum of two papers for a maximum total of 20 points that you would earn if you found two articles and wrote a summary for each one.
Papers must be paraphrased (written in your own words with no direct quotations from the original sources). Also, papers need to be submitted in Microsoft Word format (.doc or .docx). In your papers, you must include links to the articles (they must be available as full-text). The extra-credit papers do not need to be in APA format. Just write your extra-credit papers using single-spaced paragraphs.
If you are taking more than one of my classes, you will need to earn extra-credit separately for each class. For example, if you are taking two classes with me and choose to write papers for both classes, you will need to turn in four papers (regarding four different articles) to get the maximum amount of extra-credit in both classes.
Questions that need to be addressed in your paper:
- Explain what the researchers were expecting to find and why
- Describe the method used in the study
- Summarize the data that was obtained
- Did the data match the initial predictions? What other plausible explanations were proposed for their data other than what they initially hypothesized? Were there any problems in the procedures used to collect the data that might have affected the results? If so, specify the problems and explain how you think they affected the results.
- Describe one logical way in which someone could follow-up the research in the future. State your overall conclusions.
