Psychology 242
Assignment 4
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 checklist I gave you as you write your lab
report. See the “Resources for students”
section on my home page for more help with APA style.
Your assignment is to write a lab report for the experiment that
you participated in for Assignment 2.
Your lab report should be in the form of an APA manuscript. As such, it should contain the following:
- Cover
Page (Title Page)
- Abstract
- Introduction
- Method
- Results
- Conclusions
- References
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:
- Abstract
– The abstract should contain all the information any article abstract
requires.
- Introduction
– You may base your introduction solely on the description of the
experiment provided on the web site (In the “Instructor’s Pages”). 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. You should also cite at least one of
the articles mentioned on the web page if you use that information in your
introduction. Finally, do not
plagiarize from the web page! You
can use it to help you figure out what the design of the experiment was
and so forth, but you must describe the experiment and why it is important
in your own words. You may
also want to look up the abstract from the article cited on the web page
to help you figure out what is going on – but do not plagiarize from that
either!
- Method
– This should have the following subheadings: Participants, Stimuli, Design, Procedure. You may have to do the experiment again
and take notes as you go in order to write the method section. You will have to look at the data file
I’ve provided you to see how many participants there were, what their
genders were, and what their ages were.
The data is not from your class, but from participants all over the
internet who did the experiment between Dec. 1, 2002 and April 1, 2003.
- Results
– We will work through the data analysis in class or 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. (Think about whether
it makes sense to look for outliers in the type of data you have first
though.) 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 one-way ANOVA plus
post-hoc tests or t-tests. Here is
an example of how the result of an ANOVA is reported (the numbers are made
up of course): “The main effect of
condition was significant, F (1, 25) = 4.7, p < .05.” Here is an example of how a t-test is
reported: “The difference between
the two conditions was significant, t (34) = 8.2, p <
.05.” Also see your notes and
handouts from class.
- 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, and why they are important.
- References
– These must be formatted correctly:
double-spaced and using underlining or italics where needed. 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. Follow the APA’s recommendations for
how to list a web page in the References section. The following excerpts from the APA’s
web pages may be particularly relevant:
77. Stand-alone document, no author
identified, no date
GVU's
8th WWW user survey.
(n.d.). Retrieved August 8, 2000, from
|

|
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/usersurveys/survey1997-10/
|
·
If the
author of a document is not identified, begin the reference with the title of
the document.
78. Document available on university
program or department Web site
Chou, L.,
McClintock, R., Moretti, F., Nix, D. H. (1993). Technology and
|

|
education:
New wine in new bottles: Choosing pasts and imagining educational futures. Retrieved August 24, 2000, from
Columbia University, Institute for Learning Technologies Web site:
http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/papers/newwine1.html
|
·
If a
document is contained within a large and complex Web site (such as that for a
university or a government agency), identify the host organization and the
relevant program or department before giving the URL for the document itself.
Precede the URL with a colon.