ppr100

Writing Assignment
Introduction to Psychology (PSCH 100)
Jaroszewski - Spring 2003

Your writing assignment (WA) is due by the end of your Discussion Section during week 11.
This means if your Discussion Section meets on Monday, then your paper is due Monday, March 31^st.
If your Discussion Section meets on Wednesday, then your paper is due on Wednesday, April 2^nd.
If your Discussion Section meets on Friday, then your paper is due on Friday, April 4^th.

You WA is worth 50 points. There will be 2 opportunities for you to earn up to 10 bonus points for your paper. First, you can receive 4 bonus points for submitting the outside sources that you will be using (printed copy of the web page you will be reviewing and a photocopy of the article you will be using from the library). This will be due during week 5.
This means if your Discussion Section meets on Monday , then your materials are due Mon., Feb 12^th.
if your Discussion Section meets on Wednesday, then your materials are due on Wed., Feb 14^th.
If your Discussion Section meets on Friday, then your materials are due on Fri., Feb. 16^th.
NOTE: Even if you do not submit your materials for the bonus points, you still need to get your materials approved by your TA before your submit your paper.

Additionally, you can earn up to 6 bonus points for submitting your review of the article. For most of you, summarizing a Research Article is a new experience, so this is an opportunity to get some help with this task and some feedback before the paper is due. Under Review of Article below, there are a series of questions in bold print. What you will need to do is to answer each of these questions in your own words. You do not need to have this written in text form. At this point we just want to see if you are able to pull the needed information from the article. This will be due during week 8.
This means if your Discussion Section meets on Monday , then your review is due Monday, March 3^rd.
If your Discussion Section meets on Wednesday, then your review is due on Wednesday, March 5^th.
If your Discussion Section meets on Friday, then your review is due on Friday, March 7^th

Late papers will be penalized 1 POINT PER DAY (INCLUDING WEEKENDS AND HOLIDAYS) that your paper is late. ABSOLUTELY NO PAPERS WILL BE ACCEPTED AFTER YOUR LAST DISCUSSION SECTION.
If your Discussion Section meets on Mon., your paper will NOT be accepted after Mon., April 28^th.
If your Discussion Section meets on Wed., your paper will NOT be accepted after Wed., April 30^th.
If your Discussion Section meets on Fri., your paper will NOT be accepted after Fri., May 2^nd.

When submitting your paper, you MUST turn in your writing assignment AND all outside references used to complete the assignment. If you do not turn in the outside references, your WA will not be graded. It will not be considered turned in until these sources have been turned in. Late points will accumulate until everything is turned in.

Assignments MUST be turned in directly to your TA. You will need to sign in when you turn in your assignment. WA slide under the door, left in a mailbox, given to another TA, instructor, or staff person WILL NOT be considered turned in. If you are turning your WA in early or late, it is your responsibility to make arrangements with your TA to turn in the assignment. The best time to turn in WA is immediately before or following discussion section or during your TA's office hours.

Warning: DO NOT PLAGIARIZE!!!
Plagiarism will result in a ZERO on the ENTIRE ASSIGNMENT.

It is your responsibility to understand what Plagiarism is and to know the consequences of plagiarism. No Excuses!! Plagiarism is the unauthorized use of the language and/or thoughts of another author and representation of them as one's own. If you are going to use the words or thoughts of someone other than yourself, you must acknowledge the source. If even a few words come directly from another source, those words must be quoted.
Cite Information when the ideas or facts you are stating were taken from someone else but the words are your own.
Quote Information when the ideas or facts are taken from someone else AND you are using the other person's words.

How to Cite Information

If the article only has 1 author, use the author's last name (Last name, year). For example, if the author's name is John Smith, only use the last name in parentheses (Smith, 1995). If the article has 2 authors, use both names all of the time (Last Name & Last Name, year). For example, if Jane Doe and John Smith wrote an article, include both names (Doe & Smith, 1994). If the article has 3 or more authors, the first time you cite the article, use all of the names (Name, Name, ...,& Name, year). After this point when you cite this article, only use the first author's name and et al (Name et al., year). For example, James Jones, Jane Doe and John Smith wrote the article, the first time you introduce the article, use all three names (Jones, Doe, & Smith, 1992). Any time you want to refer to this article after that, use Jones et al. (Jones et al., 1992). If you want to include the names of the authors in the sentence, put the year after the author's name. According to Doe and Smith (1994) ....

If you want to refer to something that the authors of your article cited, look at the number of references they cite. If there is several, just reference it to the article you are reviewing. For example, previous research has allowed Smith (1995) to concludes .... If on the other hand, there is only 1 source cited then you want to give credit to the person who said it but reference where you found it. For example if in Smith (1995) he talks about and the article written by Jones, Doe and Smith (1992) and you want to would want to give credit to Jones, Doe and Smith but instead of using the year 1992, you would use the place where you got the information - Smith 1995. The citation should look like this - Jones, Doe and Smith (as cited in Smith, 1995) concluded ..... or if you use an end citation (Jones, Doe, & Smith, cited in Smith, 1995).
NOTE: When doing a summary/review, most of the information you are using is coming from a source. Therefore, it should be referenced (either cited or quoted). Since the purpose of THIS assignment is to see how much information you can get and understand, you will NOT be allowed to use quotes in this assignment. This means you will need to summarize the information in your own words and then cite the source that the information came from. When citing, you should cite each point. In some cases this is a sentence. In others it is an entire paragraph. While I do not expect you to have mastered the skill of referencing, this is your opportunity to learn. If you miss a citation or two, you will not get a zero on the paper. At the other extreme, copying straight from the source most definitely will. My recommendation is that you take notes on the source in phrase (NOT SENTENCE) form. Then you write your paper/summary from your notes WITHOUT looking at the original source. If you don't have the exact words that an author used, then it is much harder to copy his/her words. Just be sure to credit the idea to the author by citing.

Steps to Complete this Assignment:

Step 1: Look through the TOPIC LIST and choose a topic that you are interested in writing about.
1) selective breeding         2) attachment             3) gender development                 4) subliminal perception
5) depth perception           6) insight learning     7) serial position effect                  8) animal language
9) optimism                        10) schizophrenia      11) systematic desensitization     12) obedience

Step 2: READ the section(s) in your Textbook that are related to that topic.

Step 3: Find 1 Research Studies related to that topic.
1) Article must be from a Psychology Journal. See list in your PEC handout for commonly used Journals.

2) The Article must be an ORIGINAL RESEARCH STUDY. In order to determine if it is an original research study, look through the article. If it contains ALL of the following sections, then it is an original research study: Abstract, Introduction (this will contain the literature review and the hypotheses), Methods Section (which will minimally include a subjects/participants section and a procedure section), Results Section, Discussion/Conclusion Section, and finally a Reference Section . If all of these sections (Abstract, Introduction , Methods Section, Results Section, Discussion/Conclusion Section, and Reference Section) are not included, IT IS NOT AN ORIGINAL RESEARCH STUDY AND IS NOT ACCEPTABLE. Also, articles are NOT ACCEPTABLE if they come from Newspapers, Magazines, Books, Microfiche, Internet/Web pages, popular press, or Journals outside of Psychology.

NOTE: Since you only need 1 article, I recommend that you use the resource you have (namely your textbook). Within your textbook, many articles are referenced. These articles are referenced in the back of your book. If you use one of these articles, then you should have an easier time relating it to the information within the textbook. But be careful, NOT all of the references are for Original Research Studies.

Step 4: Photocopy the ENTIRE article. You will need to turn the articles in with your paper. You will also need to get it approved by your TA. WAs turned in with unacceptable articles (articles that are not related to one of the listed topics or articles that are not research studies, articles from inappropriate sources) WILL NOT be graded.

Step 5: Find a Web Page that discusses the same topic as discussed in your textbook and article.
HINT: When doing a search, do not use very general topics (i.e. psychology or even cognitive psychology). You will have too many pages to look through and this will seem overwhelming. Instead, use either key terms from the article or specific words from the title of the article to get a more smaller number of pages. MAKE SURE you find a Web Page that has enough information for you to summarize AND that you can relate to BOTH the information within your Textbook AND the information within the Article. (Note: they do not have to agree with each other, you simply need to be able to compare and contrast them.)

Step 6: Write your paper.
1) Because the point of this assignment is to review and summarize the information, NO QUOTES are allowed in this paper. If quotations are used, you will lose points.
2) The text of your paper should include the following sections: Introduction, Review of Article 1, Review of Web, and Conclusion. You are to use these as subheadings in your paper.

General formatting and grammar: (10 points)
Your paper needs to be 7-9 pages in length (5-7 pages of text, title page and reference page).
Number all of the pages.
Use 1' margins all of the way around.
Use a standard 12- point font.
Double Space the entire paper and do not skip lines
Title Page (1 page)
1)Title 2)Your Name 3)Date you paper is turned in 4)Your TA's Name 5)Course
Reference Page (1 page)
References should be listed in alphabetical order of the First author's last name.
Only include materials that you have read and that you cite within the paper
Reference format:
Author's last name, first initial. (year). Title of the article. Title of the Journal, vol, pages.
Author's last name, first initial. (year). Title of the chapter. In First initial & Last name of the editor (Ed.), Title of
the Book (pp. page numbers). Location: Publisher.

Author (year). Title of the webpage. Retrieved date, from http://address
- If there are more than 1 authors or more than 1 editors, include all of the names using the and symbol "&" before the last name.
- When typing the Title of a chapter or article, only the 1st word is capitalized all other words are lower case.

For the webpage, Author - can either be a person or a group.
    Year - if the page does not provide an update on date or no information regarding when it was published on
                the web (syllabus does by stating fall 2002) then for your put n.d. which means no date
    Retrieved should match the date on the printout they are giving you
    Address needs to be the complete address starting with http:// and should take you directly to what it is they
        are looking at. NO PERIOD AT THE END

References examples:
Santrock, J. W. (2003). Exploring psychology as a science. In Psychology (7^th ed., pp 4-9). Boston: McGraw Hill.
Howe, M. L. (1995). Interference effects in young children's long-term retention. Developmental Psychology, 31,
579-596.
Jaroszewski, K. A. (2002). Introduction to psychology. Retrieved October 28, 2002, from
http://www.uic.edu/classes/psych/psych100kaj

Text: The text of the paper should be 5-7 pages
Introduction: (10 points)
Brief Review of the topic (topic MUST be 1 of from the topic list above).

Summary of the information from the textbook.
Explain what you will be discussing in the main section of your paper.
include how this is related to psychology
Explain how your article and web page relates to this topic (what aspect do they look at)
Explain how your article and web page relate to the information presented in the textbook.

Review of Article: (12 points)
Summarize the article includes answers to the bold face questions. The questions and comments in () are to further explain what is meant by the questions.
- Why was the study conducted?
(What will this study tell us about the topic? How will it help us to understand this topic better? What new piece of information will be obtained from this study?)
- What were the hypotheses?
(Remember hypotheses are prediction statements that are testable. Your hypotheses should be stated in terms of comparisons between groups(IV) with one group doing better than the other on a particular measure(DV) or in terms of a relationship between 2 measures(DVs) with an increase (decrease) in one measure leading to --?-- in the other measure.)
- Who participated?
(Only include important information- how many subjects, factors used to group subjects, MAJOR selection criteria factors)
- What did the researchers do?
(Keep this general, basically what did they do, and what did they measure. DO NOT include all of the details behind the measures. For example if the study is looking at depression and uses a clinical interview and the Beck's Depression inventory, then in your paper you would want to say - They measured depression in 2 ways. First, they used a survey to determine the person's level of depression. Second, each subject was interviewed to confirm his/her level of depression. DO NOT go into all of the survey details - Subjects completed the Beck's depression questionnaire which is a XX item self-report questionnaire that measures depression on a X point likert scale.)
- What did they find?
(This should come from the Results section. Here you want to indicate what was compared, which group did better than which group on what measure, and then what that difference means. Or what measure was related to what measure, how change in one measure altered the other measure and what is suggested by this relationship. DON'T include Stats, p values, tables, graphs, ..... just indicated where differences were and which group did better/worse that which group on which tests - For ex. Group A had higher scores on test X than Group B which means that Group A is more XXX than Group B)
- Does this support or reject the hypotheses?
(Basically did the researchers find what they expected to find. Don't just say yes or no. Explain.)
- What did they conclude based on their findings?
(What do the results allow then to conclude in terms of the hypotheses, theory, research question)

Review of Web Page (6 points)
Summarize the information within the Web Page. Since each Web Page is designed differently, I can not give a specific list of questions to answer. However, be sure to include:
1) a summary of the information that you can relate to the book
2) a summary of the information that you can relate to the article
3) a summary of additional information (not related to the book or article) that helps to explain this topic

Conclusion: (12 points)
Summarize the main points within the paper
- what do each of the sources tell you about the topic (and it's relation to psychology)
- how are the 2 sources related to each other
Based on everything you have read, what did you learn about this topic and psychology?
-What can you conclude on this area of psychology?
-What is your opinion on this topic now?
-How did each of these sources help you to understand the topic? (Think about the amount of information, the type of information, and the ease of reading and understanding the information)

Grade:
Formatting/Grammar(10) Introduction(10) Review Article (12) Review Web (6) Conclusion (12)
______ ______ _______ _______ ______