Psych 130/100B Activity / Research reports

For some activities you will be ask to write up an APA style lab report

In these reports you will provide an overview of the lab according to the standardized format for typical psychology research reports. We will discuss the important features in class and over the semester your reports will become improved over time.

As such, your report will contain the following sections:

Introduction

This is where you give a background to the activity including the research question(s) and general issues considered. Each Activity sheet will have a general topic and questions on it for you to consider, these questions can be used to develop your statement of purpose.

A statement of purpose is the reason or rationale behind your study, why you are doing it and what you hope to learn. This statement might take a few sentences, but basically you want to tell the reader what you are examining and why.

Method

Here you will describe what you did to collect information that you are seeking in the activity and how you did it. The methods section of a given activity will include the following components:

Participants - here you will describe the participants of the study in a general and "objective" fashion, such as they age, gender or other relevant characteristics.

Materials - here you will describe the materials used, such as a physical apparatus, a survey or questionnaire or any props used.

Procedure - here you will describe the basic procedure followed in conducting the activity, such as the presentation of stimulus materials and the order of presentation and other such events.

Results

Here you describe the results including any statistics that you may have calculated such has the mean, range, standard deviation and levels of significance. the use of tables or graphs can be very helpful. In time we will examine these in various activities.

Discussion

Here you interpret the results against the research questions your presented in the introduction, did you find what you expected or hypothesized or not? Thoughts and considerations on Why or Why not can be presented here, along with conclusions and ideas about future studies to conduct.

References

In a typical APA reserach report you will be asked to cite your reference sources. Here is an example of how that should look:

Bhatt, G., Tonks, R.G., Berry, J.W. (2013). Culture in the history of psychology in Canada. Canadian
     Psychology, 54, (2), 115-123.