RI final drafts

When looking over your RI final drafts, please check that your scripts have all of the following:

Title page
Page numbers (on Word, click 'Insert' tab and then you see the option for page numbers)
Abstract should contain: aim, background, hypothesis/variables, method & design, sample (who & how many), procedure, results & conclusion.
Aim/rationale: should clarify both aim and link between background research and the current study (2 marks)
Design should mention conditions of the IV (for experiments only)
Materials - all paper materials should be included in appendices
Procedure - should include ethical procedures
Results - Raw data & calculations in an appendix
Graphs and tables labelled e.g. 'Table 1' and referred to in text.
Discussion - Findings stated and explained in terms of variables studied.
Discussion - problems and solutions identified
Discussion - Future research ideas and/or real-world implications
Short conclusion section with main finding and conclusion
Refs in alphabetical order by researcher surnames
Appendices complete
Throughout, avoid use of 'I', 'We', 'Our' etc.

These apparently small things could add up to losing a quarter of the available marks! Well done on your efforts, it is well worthwhile getting these as good as possible.

References

As I said in my email, it is essential in all academic subjects that you include sources in essays and reports.

One piece of advice I have already mentioned is to keep track of your sources as you go along, as it’s much quicker than having to go back and find sources again. If you are working on the computer then just type them/paste them at the foot of your document and you can sort out the formatting later. If you are using pencil and paper, ensure you write them out when you take notes on a study – do it at the start so you don’t forget.

For all studies from the Higher course and from the textbook you will be able to copy the reference from the back of the textbook or booklet. You can also cut-n-paste references from my research studies blog.

Note that if you take info from Wikipedia (which you should be wary of doing btw), they have a useful ‘cite this page’ tool (in a box on the left ) which takes you to a list of possible styles – pick the first one, APA style.

‘Citations’: while the end section is called references, the technical name for the name and year in your text is an ‘in-text citation’. Some people also refer to the references at the end as citations, or use the term citation to mean both together (the bit in the text and the full details at the end). Just to confuse you…

One other thing: a bibliography is a background reading list whereas a reference section contains all of the works and only those works cited by the author in the text. In psychology report you have a references section, there is no need to put in background reading e.g. textbooks.

Top ten psychology studies

Here's a link to a site which has a lot of interesting 'top tens' and other accessible articles.
In this one they present a selection of 10 great psychology studies, and invite you to vote for the best one. You should be familiar with at least some of these from our course so far!

http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/02/top-ten-psychology-studies.php

Et al

Some of you were asking about 'et al'. As you know, this is often used to shorten the researchers' names in a text, so you might see a reference to Rahe et al (1970).

The convention in psychology writing (such as articles and textbooks) is for one or two names to be given in full - e.g. Miller (1956), Atkinson & Shiffrin (1968) - but any more than that get reduced to the first name from the publication plus 'et al'.

Apparently the latin origin of the term is the word alius meaning 'other'. Et al is an abbreviation of the plural et alli, so it means 'and others'. However, it would be unusual in speech or writing to actually say 'and others'; the convention would be to say 'and colleagues', e.g. "Lazarus and colleagues investigated the transactional nature of stress...".

Hope that clears it up!

Slumber quality important for learning

(From BPS digest, see http://www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog for more info)

It's not just the amount of sleep we get that is so important for learning, but the quality of that sleep. That's according to a new study that made precise use of beeping noises to disrupt deep "slow-wave" sleep among 13 elderly participants (average age 60 years), without actually waking them up.

The beeping was used in such a way that although the participants' were deprived of deep sleep, their total sleep time and number of sleep stages were unaffected (compared with a comparison night of undisturbed sleep). After a night of either shallow or deep sleep, the participants had their brains scanned while they viewed 50 images of houses and landscapes. The next day they had to say which of 100 images were repeated from the daybefore.

The participants' performance was superior when a night with deep sleep had preceded the learning of the images, compared with a night of shallow sleep, even though total sleep time was the same in each case (36.6images correctly identified versus 31.4 images, on average). Moreover, the brain scans showed that during the initial viewing of images, activity in the hippocampus, the seat of human memory, was reduced aftershallow versus deep sleep, but only for those images that were subsequently recalled....

Van Der Werf et al (2009). Sleep benefits subsequent hippocampal functioning. NatureNeuroscience. In press.