Assignment
Visit the Public Library of Science (PLOS One) website:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/browse/psychology
(a peer-reviewed journal that freely publishes research articles with open licenses). Do a search for an article that interests you, then answer the following:
1. What is the hyperlink to the study you chose?
2. What is the title of the study, and who conducted the research?
3. Describe the study in a few sentences in your own words.
4. Identify and describe either the basic assumption of the researchers, or if it was an experiment, the hypothesis. Why were they conducting this research?
5. How was the study performed? What methods were used?
6. What were the results and conclusions of this study?
7. What questions do you still have after reading about this study? For example, if you were to conduct another study based off of this study, what questions would you ask and what would you still want to find out?
STEP 1: Find a popular news article from within the past 10 years that reports on the results of a psychological study. This should not be a blog entry, but a published article from a news source such as Time Magazine, The New York Times, Newsweek, NPR, CNN, Fox News, etc. A great place to look is the APA’s Psychology news portal:
http://www.apa.org/news/psycport/
. Read through the article and ensure that it is descriptive and sufficiently long enough in order to draw conclusions from the original research mentioned.
STEP 2: Go find the psychological study or studies that are mentioned in the news report. Sometimes those are not freely available online, so you may have to track down the original study through your library’s website. You can find these articles within reputable journals, such as the
American Journal of Psychology
,
Cognitive Psychology
,
Emotion
,
Journal of Abnormal Psychology
,
Journal of Applied Psychology
,
Journal of Counseling Psychology
,
Journal of Educational Psychology
,
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
, and
Memory
. The study should have been performed within the past 10 years.
STEP 3: Write a paper between 250-500 words that
· describes and summarizes both articles
· compares and contrasts the key points, style, and purpose of the news article with that of the research article
· examines if the news article accurately describes the research
· includes correct
APA citations
(both in-text and in a reference page) for both of the articles