Guidelines for Preparing APA Research Proposal Posters

Poster Topic Due: Friday, April 6, 2001

Poster Due: Friday, April 27, 2001

As part of your concluding experience in PSCH 242, you will explore how research is a continuous, ongoing process. You will work with a partner to complete this assignment. (Come talk to me if you would prefer to work alone on this project.) You will discover first hand how studies develop from previous experiments. Researchers usually conduct studies that answer their original questions, but their results also create new questions. Researchers often outline these new questions, or areas for research, in an article's discussion section. So, this final assignment involves exploring questions left unanswered by previous research. You will create a research proposal poster in which you present your research questions, describe how you would go about answering them, and discuss what you expect to find. In other words, you will write a proposal for a future study. Your proposed experiment will very likely be a partial replication of an already published experiment.

Results from studies are often presented at conferences using the poster format. People walk around a large room reading posters and talking to the authors about their posters. So, on the last day of class we will have a mini-conference. You will display your poster and respond in writing to some questions about several posters that you will read.

General comments:

• Your poster must include the following sections: introduction; method; expected results, proposed analyses, and discussion; and references.
• Your experiment must be a complex design (i.e., a 2 x 2 factorial design).
• The poster must be typed using large font (at least 20 point font) so that people can stand 3-5 feet from your poster and still be able to read it. Plan to paste/glue/or otherwise attach your typed pages to a posterboard and then tape the posterboard to the classroom wall.
• Your poster should include a title and the names of the authors (in alphabetical order).
• Make your poster attractive and easy to read so that people will be interested in your work.

• Introduction (2 page limit):
• Base your study on a previously published psychology experiment. You can locate the study in one of three ways. (1) You can use any study that we used in class to illustrate 2 x 2 factorial designs; (2) you can use an experiment that you read about in one of your other psychology classes; or (3) you can conduct a literature search using PSYCHINFO to identify a psychology journal article that deals with a topic that you find interesting.
• Regardless of how you select the article that will serve as the basis for your research proposal, you need to identify questions left unanswered or issues that were not addressed in previous research.
• Briefly summarize the previous research findings. Then summarize your thoughts regarding the question or issue and explain why it is important to conduct your proposed experiment.
• Clearly state your directional research hypothesis.


• Methods: (limit 2 pages)

After you describe your research question, you need to describe how you will go about testing your idea. You need to decide on a method to investigate your research questions. As in most research programs, you will probably base your methodology on the methods used in previous research:

(a) Determine which research method is best suited for answering your research question. Describe the design of your experiment (i.e., 2 x 2 between groups design; 2 x 2 mixed groups design; 2 x 2 within groups design).

• Identify your research participants.
• Describe your materials.
• Clearly describe your procedure. What exactly will the participants need to do when they participate in your study?


• Expected Results, Proposed Analyses, and Discussion: (limit 2 pages)

(a) Clearly state what you expect to find - which groups will be significantly different from each other and how will they be different.

• Present your expected results in clearly labeled figure or table.
• Analysis plan: You will need to indicate in your results section if you expect an interaction, and you should follow the analysis plan appropriate to your expected results.
• Conclude with a brief statement about the implications of your expected findings.



• References:

(a) Provide an APA style reference to the article that you used as the basis for your proposal as well as any other articles you cite in your poster.

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