Moulson, Section 061 Page 1 of 4 PSY 202 Introduction to Psychology II Winter 2013 Detailed Assignment Instructions For our

r assignment, you need to imagine that you have been asked by our textbooks publisher to write a New Frontiers or PsychoMythology box for one of the chapters covered in our course (Chapters 9-16). There is an example of each kind of box in each chapter (on pages 371, 377, 422, 427, 466, 470, 512, 514, 566, 579, 594, 627, 644, 669, 711 & 715), so you should model yours on those, although yours should be somewhat longer and more detailed than the ones in our text (specifics are provided below). It will take some time to read the following details, but a few minutes invested now should save you much more time and potential frustration later on. In detail, you will need to do the following: 1. Find two empirical research articles, published in scholarly journals since 2004, on a topic from Chapters 9-16 that is of interest to you. An empirical research article is one in which the authors have conducted a research study (it can be correlational or experimental) in which they have collected data. You can identify empirical articles by their use of sections like Abstract, Method, Results, and Discussion; be careful to avoid theoretical/review articles, which usually do not contain data and results from a new study. Some appropriate scholarly journals in which you can find your articles are listed below (you are not limited to these, but they give you an idea of the type of publication youre looking for, as opposed to something like Psychology Today, magazines, or newspapers): Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Psychological Science Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology Child Development Journal of Personality The Ryerson library carries hundreds of relevant journals, electronically and/or in hard copy. Here are some suggestions for finding appropriate articles: a). You can search one of the databases that the library has access to (PsycInfo is your best bet) using keywords that relate to the topic you are interested in (e.g., intelligence and test validity; or infants and attachment; or facial feedback and emotion). In PsycInfo, you should click on Advanced Search to get the full range of search options. b). You can just browse through journals like those listed above, either online or in person, until you find articles that seem interesting to you. c). You can follow up on one of the references from our text. For example, if youre reading about affective forecasting on p. 476, you might want to find the article by Sevdalis & Harvey (2007) that is cited on that page. The full reference for the article is listed alphabetically (according to the first authors last name) in the texts References section on p. R-46: Biased forecasting of postdecisional affect, in the journal Psychological Science from the year 2007, on pages 678-681.

Moulson, Section 061 Page 2 of 4 2. Using the New Frontiers and PsychoMythology boxes from our text as guides, write a text-box about the articles you have found, again keeping in mind that your box should be somewhat longer and more detailed than the examples. Note that you are not being asked to write an empirical research article, so your text-box will not have sections for an Abstract, Method, Results, and Discussion, although you will have a References section for the two articles on which your box is based. In particular, make sure you do the following: a) Your text-box should begin by introducing the reader to the topic in some interesting way (perhaps by getting the reader to fill out part of a questionnaire that one of the articles may have used, or to think back on a time when they have experienced an issue like the one your articles discuss, or a recent news story/case study). Try to make the introduction attention-grabbing. b) You should then describe the research question that the articles discuss and the data/results they contain. Try not to get bogged down in the details here; the most important thing here is to try to summarise the question that the studies addressed and the results they found in a way that highlights what is most interesting about them. Write at a level that would be easily understood by an undergraduate audience, and make sure that you explain any technical terms that you use (e.g. predictive validity, fluid intelligence, pre-operational stage, secure attachment, basic emotions). c) Address future directions that the research might go in talk about additional studies that might be interesting to conduct in the future, with a slightly different procedure, or a different sample of participants. Say why this new study would be interesting or important. d) Finally, finish up by creating two Assess Your Knowledge questions relating to the topic that you have written about. Assess Your Knowledge questions appear throughout our textbook, so look at those for examples. You can create either multiple-choice questions, or fill-in-the-blank questions, but make them relevant to the topic you have discussed in your text-box, and be sure to include the correct answers. e) Although its not required, you can include an interesting visual in your text-box, such as a graph, or photo, or both. Make sure any visual you include is related to the topic that is being discussed. For example, you might include a graph or chart that helps the reader understand the important results from the articles, or a picture that shows a situation related to the topic of the text-box. f) Include a references section (a separate page at the end of your assignment, with the word References at the top), that includes the two references for the empirical articles you chose, written in APA style.

Moulson, Section 061 Page 3 of 4 FAQs: (1) What do I do if I dont understand the two research articles I have found? You shouldnt start sweating too much at the prospect of trying to decipher two articles published in the kind of academic journals we have suggested. Your assignment is not to exhaustively report on your articles contents, especially the potentially complicated experimental procedure and results/statistical analyses. Instead of that kind of bottom-up approach, try a top-down or working-backward approach think of the kind of story you want to write for your text box, based on your understanding of your articles and other information you might have, and then pick and choose issues, ideas, hypotheses, methods, results, implications, etc. from your articles that fit with your story, potentially ignoring parts that you dont understand. The goal is to write an informative, accurate, interesting text box that readers want to read, not to drag yourself through the sometimes impenetrable details of a typical empirical research article for its own sake youll have plenty of time for that in more senior courses! (2) Is this an essay, a report, an opinion piece, or what? Try not to box yourself in by thinking in terms of an essay vs. a report or short story or novella or whatever other kinds of categories youve learned about in English and other writing classes in the past. Use the text-boxes in the text-book as your guide to the type of writing you should produce and the level of detail you should be writing. Your aim is to write at a level appropriate for an undergraduate textbook. Remember, the reader of your text-box will not have read the original articles that you read, so you must write about them in clear and simple language without assuming that the reader has the specialist knowledge that you now have. The reader is relying on you to translate the research articles, which might contain complex, scientific terms, into easy-to-understand English. (3) Can I quote from the research articles? NO. You are to use no direct quotes from your research articles. Try to write things as simply as possible, in your own words. (4) How do I cite the research articles when I describe their ideas/ methodology/ results/ discussion? You should be citing ideas, results, etc. from the two articles youve read. When citing one of the articles, you dont need to repeatedly cite it within a paragraph if, for example, its obvious that youre discussing the same source. So you dont have to write: Smith and Jones (2004) did a study on autism (Smith and Jones, 2004). In that study, Smith and Jones (2004) showed that children with autism had difficulties on a theory of mind task (Smith & Jones, 2004). Instead, you can write, within the same paragraph: Smith and Jones (2004) did a study on autism. In that study, they found that children with autism had difficulties on a theory of mind

Moulson, Section 061 Page 4 of 4 task. and so on. You can also cite our textbook if you include specific points that relate to your text box, but you wouldnt need to include it in your References section (because youre pretending that your box is IN the textbook). I realize that your articles likely cite dozens of other articles, but many of you already know that it is not appropriate for you to cite those articles unless you have read them yourself. You should try your best to base your paper on just the original information in your two articles and related information in our textbook. (5) What is the format for this assignment, in terms of font size, page limits, etc.? The assignment should be between 5-7 pages, double-spaced, in 12 point font, with at least 1 inch margins all around. That works out to a range of about 1250-1500 words. Alternatively, if you wish, you may format your assignment as though it is an actual text-box in the textbook, although there are no extra points for doing soit just might be more interesting for you to write, and for us to read. In either case, you should use APA format for the citation of your sources and in your References section, keeping in mind that there are hundreds of examples in our textbook for how to do that. You must also submit the abstracts of the research articles on which your text-box is based. (6) When should I hand it in? How should I hand it in? The submission date for the assignment is March 27th. We will use Blackboard to submit the papers, which includes the use of turnitin.com. You do not need to submit a hard copy. (7) How much overlap in my turnitin report is bad? Perhaps the most important point to realize about turnitin is that there is no particular amount of overlap that is bad, because there are different reasons for WHY the overlap exists. For example, 25% overlap might be due to a 1% overlap with each of 25 separate sources, or it might be due to 25% overlap with just one source. In the first case, its unlikely theres a problem, but in the second case its more likely to be problematic. So, your goal is not to get your overlap to zero, but to make sure that you havent represented someone elses ideas and writing as your own. Think of turnitin as a learning tool and not as a way to catch cheaters.