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:

 

 

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 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!
  3. 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. 
  4. 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.
  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, and why they are important.
  6. 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.