Psychology 242

Assignment 2

Lab Report in APA format

 

This assignment is intended to develop your skills for reporting experimental research using correct APA style.  You should consult the Publication Manual of the APA for the correct format.  You may also find it helpful to consult your textbook and the handout I gave you as you write your lab report.

 

Your assignment is to write a lab report for the experiment on spatial cueing that you participated in for Assignment 1.  Your lab report should be in the form of an APA manuscript.  As such, it should contain the following:

 

 

The emphasis of this assignment will be on the Method and Results sections.  Consequently, I am allowing you to take some shortcuts in the Introduction and Discussion sections – shortcuts that you should never take for preparing a full manuscript for submission to a journal or for a term paper or for the paper you will write based on your project for this class, but that are OK for simply practicing the use of APA style in this paper.  Prepare your paper with the following guidelines:

 

  1. Abstract – The abstract should contain all the information any article abstract requires.
  2. Introduction – You may base your introduction solely on the description of the experiment provided on the Coglab web site.  You must cite the web page, however, or it is plagiarism.  To find the correct format for a citation of a web page, see the “Resources” for the class on my web page.  The author of the Coglab web page you will be citing is Ian Neath.  You should also cite some of the articles mentioned on the Coglab web page if you use that information in your introduction.
  3. Method – This should have the following subheadings:  Participants, Stimuli, Design, Procedure.   The apparatus can be mentioned in the procedure section since it was simply standard PC computers.  You may have to do the experiment again and take notes as you go in order to write the method section.  Because there are aspects of the procedure that you can not know (such as exactly how long the delay was between the signal and the target stimulus), it is permissible in this assignment to use words like “approximately” and “appeared to be” to describe the details of the methods.  Of course, in a real paper this would be unacceptable.
  4. Results – We will work through the data analysis in the lab.  You should copy the data file to your computer and then open it in SPSS.  The results section should describe what result was predicted (based on the ideas in the introduction) and whether the results confirmed that prediction.  Your results section should begin by stating what data you examined and how it was analyzed.  If you excluded any data points or subjects as outliers, you should say so and describe how you decided what to exclude.  Report the means and standard deviations (or some other measure of variability) for the conditions you will compare.  Perform an appropriate statistical test to test the hypothesis of the experiment, and report its results.  In this assignment it will probably be a t-test.  Here is an example of how a t-test is reported (the numbers are made up of course):  “The difference between the two conditions was significant, t (34) = 8.2, p < .05.” 
  5. Discussion – This can be very brief, and does not have to cite any literature beyond that cited in the introduction.  Remind the reader of the hypothesis.  Summarize the results and state whether they support the hypothesis.  Note any methodological limitations or problems with the study, and discuss what the results mean.
  6. References – These must be formatted correctly:  double-spaced and using only underlining, not italics.  You do not have to have more than two references however.  For web sites, the full URL (http://www….etc) should be given in parenthesis in the text.  No entry is necessary in the References section if you gave the full URL in the text of the paper.