formal reporting style for psychological research
The aim of the Research Report assignment is to familiarise you with the formal reporting style for psychological research, and to further develop your information literacy skills. This includes your ability to: construct a logical argument based on the research literature in this area; accurately describe the methodological information; Present, describe and interpret the results and statistics and explain the pattern of results in relation to the literature. You are required to submit the Title, Introduction, Methods, Results (Including Graphs), Discussion and References sections of a research report based on the results from the experiment that you completed in Week 3 of this course.
The background, methodological information and results are available in the Experiment Information PDF released in Week 4. The Week 8 online tutorial will provide some information regarding the basics of how to write a research report.
Word Limit: The word limit for the research report is 2000 words including in-text citations and subheadings. Any submission that exceeds 2000 words will be penalised 5% per 50 words over the word limit. This means that an assessment of 2001 words will receive a 5% penalty, an assessment of 2051 will be penalised 10% and so on. The report title, Figure captions and Reference list are not included in this word limit.[unique_solution]
Formatting: Your research report must be formatted according to APA 6th edition publishing guidelines. You must write in 12-point font (Times New Roman), DOUBLE SPACE and your document should have 2cm margins. Your in-text citations and reference list must be formatted to the APA 6th edition style guide.
Submission: The Research Report assignment should be (1) uploaded to the Turnitin link entitled “Assessment 2 Research Report Submission” which will be visible in the ‘Assessment’ tab on the Moodle course site in the format of a word document NOT PDF; by 11:59pm Sunday the 21st of May (Week 11). A late penalty of 2% will be deducted for each day the report is overdue, including weekend days. A ‘day’, in this context, refers to 24 hours; thus if your assignment is due on Sunday at 11:59pm and you submit it on Tuesday at 12:05am, you will be penalized 4% for being 2 days late. It is entirely your responsibility to get your assignment submitted on time; individual technical issues will not be deemed an acceptable excuse for lateness.
The report must be your own, independent work. It must, of course, be based on your reading and on the material provided on the assignment sheet, but it should not simply be a restatement of this material or include any copy pasted information. Presenting other people’s work as your own is plagiarism. Plagiarism is a serious academic offence! See Section 13 of the Course Outline for more information regarding plagiarism.
Marking Criteria: There is a Research Report checklist (designed for you to check your own work) and a marking criteria rubric available on Moodle. The marking criteria explains the weighting of each section and how your tutors will be marking your work.
Feedback: You will receive a mark out of 100 for the research report and written feedback based on the rubric. Your marked Research Report will be made available on Moodle during the study period. If you have any questions about your mark you should email your tutor as soon as possible.
Research Report
You must include all of the following sections in your full Research Report.
Title: You should provide a title for the report on a separate title page.
Introduction: You must include an introduction for your research report. This should be based on your report introduction from Assessment 1. You should make changes to your original introduction based on the feedback provided by your tutor for Assessment 1.
Method: All of the information regarding the method of the experiment is available in the Experiment Information PDF located in the Assessment tab on the Moodle course page. You must include a design, participant, materials and procedure section in your Research report. Each of these sections has its own subheading. Please refer to the Report checklist and writing workshop for more information on formatting a method section.
Results: The results are presented in the tables and figures in the Experiment Information PDF. You need to present the data in the tables in a graph. Do Not present the data twice. You cannot copy and paste the Figures from the Experiment Information PDF, you must create the graphs yourself.
You must also report the statistics provided in the Experiment Information PDF in the Results section of your Research Report.
We will briefly discuss the results in the Week 9 tutorial.
Please refer to the Research Report checklist and the writing workshop for information on formatting your Research Report.
Discussion: Your discussion section should provide a summary of the results from the experiment. Do NOT include statistics in the discussion section, simply state the pattern of results. You should indicate whether the results support or refute the hypotheses you presented in your introduction. You should then discuss whether the results are consistent or consistent with the previous that you reviewed in your introduction and offer an explanation/argument as to why they are same or different. Finally, you should discuss any methodological limitations of the study and provide ONE suggestion or future research.
NB: You can include new references in your discussion section to explain the results if you wish. However, you MUST refer to the papers you reviewed in the introduction as well. When explaining your results, it is important to recognise the research from the literature review that lead to your original hypotheses (even if you would like to explain the results differently).
References: You must include a reference list that contains all of the papers you have cited throughout your Research Report. This must begin on a new page, have the heading References (centre aligned) and must be formatted according to APA 6th edition publishing guidelines.