Journal Article Assignment

When psychologists conduct research, they rely on scholarly journal articles to acquire information. This assignment is designed to help you learn how to read a scholarly journal article, extract important information, summarize what you read, and critique the article's strengths and weaknesses.

This journal includes research conducted by undergraduate students, and it addresses a variety of empirical questions in the field of psychology. Don't worry if you don't fully understand your article in its entirety-try to get the big picture as best as you can. The more articles you read, the easier it gets to understand them.

Format: Your paper must adhere to APA style guidelines. APA style is an official style and format used for written work in psychology and other social sciences.

If you take other courses in psychology or social sciences, you will likely be asked to write a paper in APA format. This is a good opportunity for you to familiarize yourself with APA style if you haven't done so already. Please refer to the writing style resources available in the ‘Tools and Resources' folder within your Blackboard classroom to learn about APA style.

The content of your paper should be between 500 and 750 words (approximately 2-3 pages; use the Word Count function to count). Information on your title page does not count towards the word limit-only the content of your paper does.

Paper outline:

1. Introduce the topic and describe previous research conducted on the topic. Discuss the background of the study and why the authors believe it is necessary or important to conduct the study that they did.

(This information can be found in the Introduction or beginning section of the article you selected)

2. Describe the hypothesis.

3. Describe the methods used to investigate the hypothesis

(This information can be found in the methods section of the article you selected)

4. Describe the findings/results

(This information can be found in the results and discussion sections of the article you selected.Do not worry about trying to understand the statistics; the authors interpret the statistics in plain language in the ‘Discussion' section of the article.)

• In what ways were the results consistent with the hypotheses/predictions? Any unexpected findings?

5. Describe the implications of the findings. What are the strength and limitation of the research discussed by the authors? What are alternative explanations for the findings if there are any? What research questions did the authors suggest need to be investigated in the future? Describe any important issues discussed by the authors.

(This information can be found in the discussion section of the article you selected)

6. Your personal reflection

• How do you think this research contributed to the state of knowledge about this topic?

• How has reading this article changed the way you think about the topics addressed in the research?

• What did you perceive as being the strengths of this research? What were its limitations?

• Describe the important questions that still need to be addressed by future research. Be sure to explain why you think those questions are important enough to be answered.

• Describe any thoughts or insight you had while reading the article.

7. Include a complete reference on a separate page.

IMPORTANT:

• Avoid sharing personal experiences or personal opinions while summarizing the article. Your job is to read it and summarize what you read. You can express your personal experiences and opinions in the last section of your paper (i.e. personal reflection).

• Paraphrase. DO NOT use quotes. Unlike humanities, psychologists do not use a lot of quotations in scientific paper unless it is absolutely necessary to do so. The general rule in scientific writing is to express authors' ideas in your own words if there are ways to do so. For this reason, you must paraphrase rather than quote the article.

• Be careful not to plagiarize. Plagiarism is a serious offense in academic institutions. It is an act of fraud. It involves stealing someone else's work and lying about it afterward. Before you start summarizing the article you selected, it is important for you to understand what constitutes plagiarism and how you can avoid it.

Changing a few words in someone else's sentence, changing the sentence structure while maintaining the original words, or changing some words to synonyms are still considered as plagiarism. Before you start summarizing the article, please make sure to read the 2 documents (9 Things You Should Already Know About Plagiarism, How to Avoid Plagiarism) available in the Journal Article Assignment folder in Blackboard. Knowing how to properly paraphrase is important skill that can help you succeed in college.