Introduction to Research Methods In Psychology/Practice Assignments/Practice Assignment 4

Practice Assignment 4: Research Report
Prior to completing your research report, you are strongly encouraged to consult regarding any concerns and difficulties you may have with this practice assignment. Even very experienced researchers do not write their articles in isolation—they discuss their ideas with their colleagues and allow others to read preliminary drafts of their work so that they can benefit from the expertise of others. Therefore, it is strongly to your benefit that you discuss your report.

Your task here is to write a report of your now-completed nonexperimental research project, building on your work in Practice Assignments 1 and 3. Your report should include a Title Page, Abstract, Introduction, Method, Results (including any tables and/or graphs), Discussion, and References. For a brief overview of what goes into these sections along with some useful advice please refer to the section for “Empirical Paper or Research Proposal” in Harvard College’s “.” For a more detailed account and an example of the structure and format of an APA style research report, please read through the American Psychological Association’s (APA) “.”

Note that in your results section, you should state how the results relate to your hypotheses (for example, state whether or not your hypothesis was supported). However, this is a course on research methods in psychology, not a course on statistics. Therefore, although a Results section would normally include the inferential statistical analyses that support your summary of the findings, you need only use descriptive statistics (e.g., Means and Standard Deviations) for your results and present them in an informative way. This should include presenting the results in tables and/or graphs. These tables and/or graphs should be included at the end of your report (following the references), as illustrated in the APA guide referenced above.

Students often want to know how long their research report should be and how many references they should include. Unlike many papers for university courses, it is difficult to specify these values. The length will depend on many factors including the complexity of your research project and the number of articles that you cite and relate to your study. The number of references that you cite will also depend on the extent to which your research topic has been studied. Though it is difficult to specify the number of pages and references, past experience has shown that good reports usually include around eight to ten pages of writing along with at least five references.

Marking Guide
Here are some guidelines to show how this practice assignment might be marked by an instructor, if it were being graded. In this course, all assignments are for practice purposes only and will not be graded.

Practice Assignment 4 is marked out of 52 marks, in accordance with the following grading rubric:

The marking guide for Practice Assignment 4 has been adapted from: