12 pt Times New Roman, double spaced.
Part 1: Article Summary
The article summary will be about one-third of your final paper’s length and will count toward about one-third of the grade.
In short, your summary should provide all the information someone will need to understand the original study without actually having to read the article itself. If your reader finds themselves confused or needs to track down the article to understand things, you have left out some critical information.
Introduction
Clearly identify the research question(s) and hypotheses (they are not the same thing)
Summarize the significance of the study; why is it important we answer this question?
Introduce any important concepts, definitions, theories, etc. necessary to understand the study.
Methodology
Describe the general structure and design of the study.
Use terminology we discussed in this course wherever possible. Was it correlational or experimental research? Cross-sectional design? Longitudinal design? etc.
Who were the participants? How old were they? What was their background?
Summarize all the important measures used to address the study’s research question(s)
What tasks/questionnaires/tools etc. were used? What are the important DVs? What procedure did the participants follow in completing the major tasks?
Exclude any details beyond what a reader would need to know to understand the study; the inclusion of unnecessary details that muddy your key points will hurt the overall quality of your paper.
Succinctly and in your own words, describe the procedure of the study. What did the participants see and do when participating in the study?
Results and Discussion
Briefly describe the main findings of the study.
How do the authors interpret the results with regard to their research question(s)?
What are some of the limitations acknowledged by the authors? What did they highlight as potential next steps or follow-ups for their study?
In the subsequent sections, you need to highlight your own critiques and ideas for a follow-up study. It is okay to expand on an idea the authors touched on briefly if you feel there was something missed, but you cannot just borrow from their own self-criticism and ideas for follow-ups; to do so would be plagiarism.
Part 2: Article Critique
The article critique is also about one-third of your final paper’s length and will count toward about one-third of the grade.
Pick one or two critical ideas you had yourself while reading the paper and discuss them in more depth. The goal here is to share your thoughts on the subject, whatever they may be. Importantly, you don’t need to cover all the points listed below; it is more important to flesh out one or two ideas in full than to touch on several ideas without sufficiently exploring them. You could discuss:
An alternative explanation of the findings the authors of the article may have overlooked that could explain their results in a different way or draw their conclusions into question. Be sure to clearly flesh out what about the current study led to this ambiguity and why it’s important to address in future research.
A limitation in the methods of the study that may draw into question the external validity (how the study generalizes to the real world) or internal validity (whether the study actually measures what it intended/claims to).
An important real-world application of this research or a limitation in how this research could be applied to a real-world group or context. Describe some implications of the current research in this domain. (Remember: this cannot be something the authors already discussed at length).
Important things to avoid
Do not discuss why you liked/disliked the study, or how it made you feel. Reflect intellectually, rather than emotionally, on the subject matter and contribute ideas of your own.
Try not to go after “low-hanging fruit”. Criticisms such as “the sample was too small” or “the study only studied children in one culture” are so general they could be applied to any circumstance or subject matter; in other words, they are lazy arguments that do not contribute much to our intellectual discourse. Dig into the theory or conceptual matter of the study you are reviewing and provide an in-depth review specifically catered to that study.
Keep the tone constructive and give the researchers the respect they are due. Scientists work hard to produce cool and impactful research, and it isn’t fair to criticize a study for not doing everything as there are pragmatic limitations every study needs to work around. For example, not every study has the resources to collect data from children in multiple countries across the world. This doesn’t mean you can’t reflect on something like the cross-cultural generalizability of the study, just make sure to have a strong argument why this is essential to understand the topic in question.
Part 3: Follow-up Study
The follow-up study is also about one-third of your final paper’s length and will count toward about one-third of the grade.
Having clarified in detail what lingering questions or issues remain after digesting your article, briefly describe a follow-up study you would run and how it would further contribute to our knowledge of the subject. You do not need to include incidental details like the exact sample size you would study, how you would recruit participants, the statistical analyses you would use, etc. Focus on the big picture questions: why are you conducting this follow-up, what are the key points of your methods/procedure, what might you find and what might this tell us about children?
As a follow-up study, it is totally appropriate to borrow heavily from the methods/procedure of the study you critiqued. Recreating and modifying the work of other researchers is a normal and important part of psychological research. This is not plagiarism so long as you give full credit to the original authors and clearly explain what key changes or additions you would make to the original study (and why). For example, maybe you are adding a new condition to the study, using a new measure to control for a potential confound, or comparing the performance of new groups of children (different ages, different groups, etc.)
You are also welcome to design a new study all of your own; just make sure to explain everything in sufficient detail and to think through the rationale underlying your decisions carefully. Designing studies can be hard!
After describing the methods of your study, ask yourself:
What are at least 2 different patterns of results you might find?
How would you interpret these different findings?
What theoretical or real-world implications would they have?
It is important to consider what you could find in order to make it clear why the follow-up would be worth doing, and it’s important to consider multiple potential outcomes (psychologists never know what they are going to discover until they actually collect their data; that’s the fun of research!)Part 1: Article Summary
The article summary will be about one-third of your final paper’s length and will count toward about one-third of the grade.
In short, your summary should provide all the information someone will need to understand the original study without actually having to read the article itself. If your reader finds themselves confused or needs to track down the article to understand things, you have left out some critical information.
Introduction
Clearly identify the research question(s) and hypotheses (they are not the same thing)
Summarize the significance of the study; why is it important we answer this question?
Introduce any important concepts, definitions, theories, etc. necessary to understand the study.
Methodology
Describe the general structure and design of the study.
Use terminology we discussed in this course wherever possible. Was it correlational or experimental research? Cross-sectional design? Longitudinal design? etc.
Who were the participants? How old were they? What was their background?
Summarize all the important measures used to address the study’s research question(s)
What tasks/questionnaires/tools etc. were used? What are the important DVs? What procedure did the participants follow in completing the major tasks?
Exclude any details beyond what a reader would need to know to understand the study; the inclusion of unnecessary details that muddy your key points will hurt the overall quality of your paper.
Succinctly and in your own words, describe the procedure of the study. What did the participants see and do when participating in the study?
Results and Discussion
Briefly describe the main findings of the study.
How do the authors interpret the results with regard to their research question(s)?
What are some of the limitations acknowledged by the authors? What did they highlight as potential next steps or follow-ups for their study?
In the subsequent sections, you need to highlight your own critiques and ideas for a follow-up study. It is okay to expand on an idea the authors touched on briefly if you feel there was something missed, but you cannot just borrow from their own self-criticism and ideas for follow-ups; to do so would be plagiarism.
Part 2: Article Critique
The article critique is also about one-third of your final paper’s length and will count toward about one-third of the grade.
Pick one or two critical ideas you had yourself while reading the paper and discuss them in more depth. The goal here is to share your thoughts on the subject, whatever they may be. Importantly, you don’t need to cover all the points listed below; it is more important to flesh out one or two ideas in full than to touch on several ideas without sufficiently exploring them. You could discuss:
An alternative explanation of the findings the authors of the article may have overlooked that could explain their results in a different way or draw their conclusions into question. Be sure to clearly flesh out what about the current study led to this ambiguity and why it’s important to address in future research.
A limitation in the methods of the study that may draw into question the external validity (how the study generalizes to the real world) or internal validity (whether the study actually measures what it intended/claims to).
An important real-world application of this research or a limitation in how this research could be applied to a real-world group or context. Describe some implications of the current research in this domain. (Remember: this cannot be something the authors already discussed at length).
Important things to avoid
Do not discuss why you liked/disliked the study, or how it made you feel. Reflect intellectually, rather than emotionally, on the subject matter and contribute ideas of your own.
Try not to go after “low-hanging fruit”. Criticisms such as “the sample was too small” or “the study only studied children in one culture” are so general they could be applied to any circumstance or subject matter; in other words, they are lazy arguments that do not contribute much to our intellectual discourse. Dig into the theory or conceptual matter of the study you are reviewing and provide an in-depth review specifically catered to that study.
Keep the tone constructive and give the researchers the respect they are due. Scientists work hard to produce cool and impactful research, and it isn’t fair to criticize a study for not doing everything as there are pragmatic limitations every study needs to work around. For example, not every study has the resources to collect data from children in multiple countries across the world. This doesn’t mean you can’t reflect on something like the cross-cultural generalizability of the study, just make sure to have a strong argument why this is essential to understand the topic in question.
Part 3: Follow-up Study
The follow-up study is also about one-third of your final paper’s length and will count toward about one-third of the grade.
Having clarified in detail what lingering questions or issues remain after digesting your article, briefly describe a follow-up study you would run and how it would further contribute to our knowledge of the subject. You do not need to include incidental details like the exact sample size you would study, how you would recruit participants, the statistical analyses you would use, etc. Focus on the big picture questions: why are you conducting this follow-up, what are the key points of your methods/procedure, what might you find and what might this tell us about children?
As a follow-up study, it is totally appropriate to borrow heavily from the methods/procedure of the study you critiqued. Recreating and modifying the work of other researchers is a normal and important part of psychological research. This is not plagiarism so long as you give full credit to the original authors and clearly explain what key changes or additions you would make to the original study (and why). For example, maybe you are adding a new condition to the study, using a new measure to control for a potential confound, or comparing the performance of new groups of children (different ages, different groups, etc.)
You are also welcome to design a new study all of your own; just make sure to explain everything in sufficient detail and to think through the rationale underlying your decisions carefully. Designing studies can be hard!
After describing the methods of your study, ask yourself:
What are at least 2 different patterns of results you might find?
How would you interpret these different findings?
What theoretical or real-world implications would they have?
It is important to consider what you could find in order to make it clear why the follow-up would be worth doing, and it’s important to consider multiple potential outcomes (psychologists never know what they are going to discover until they actually collect their data; that’s the fun of research!)