Psychology and Education

Paper instructions:
Pick one topic from any field of psychology that you find particularly interesting. The topic can be something we have discussed or will discuss in class, or it can be something else related to psychology. Find at least three sources, at least two of which must be scientific journal articles, and write a paper that summarizes and discusses the findings related to the topic. Example topics might include “Unilateral Neglect”, “Retrograde and Anterograde Amnesia”, “Interview Techniques for Eyewitness Testimony”, “Narcolepsy”, “Learning during sleep”, “Adolescent brain”, “The Bystander effect”, “”Dissociative Identity Disorder”. If you have questions about your topic or need ideas, please come talk to me or email me.
As stated above, you need to find sources related to the topic for this paper. If our textbook discusses your topic, feel free to use it as one source, but you need AT LEAST 3 sources, and at least two of them must be scientific, academic journal articles. It might be a good idea to locate a review article that discusses your topic, and use that as one of the journal sources, or get ideas from it about other sources. All the sources you use must be either academic journal articles, books (as stated, our textbook is fine as a source), or reliable, academic/scientific online sources (not Wikipedia!). Cite the sources in your paper and list the sources at the end of the assignment in APA style. To find actual scientific journal articles, you can use the library search and other library resources. You could also try Google Scholar to locate academic sources.

The purpose of this paper assignment is to review, summarize and discuss the findings related to your topic. It can be challenging to read scientific journal articles that sometimes contain many technical details. You don’t have to understand everything about the articles; what is important is that you try to understand what kind of research the scientific community is conducting to explore your topic, and what kinds of conclusions the authors make about the research findings they are discussing.

a)How you summarize the research done about the topic, whether your sources are relevant to the topic. Keep in mind that a reader who is not familiar with the topic should get a good understanding about the main issues discussed in the scientific (and/or medical) community based on your summary.

b)Why do you think this topic is interesting and important? What is your opinion of some issues related to this topic? (Example: potential disagreements in the scientific community about whether people can learn during sleep).

c)How do you evaluate the research done about this topic, and/or how would you investigate this issue with scientific methods? (Examples: How would you evaluate and/or investigate false memory therapy methods, eyewitness characteristics, etc.) Who would be your subjects, how would you go about collecting data? Are there ethical issues related to investigating this issue? This does not need to be a detailed research plan, just ideas about how you would find out more about the topic, or improve the research already done.

Psychology and Education

Experimenters took advantage of a natural situation to study the effect of “propinquity,” or close physical position, on friendships. The participants were 40 first- year students who were attending an orientation meeting at their university. None of the freshmen knew each other before the meeting, and they were assigned to sit in one of the 40 classroom seats at random. The researchers recorded who sat by whom. Two months later, they asked each person about which of the other students, among the 40 freshmen at the first meeting, they had become friends with. The researchers compared friendship rates between people sitting next to each other at the first meeting with friendship rates between people sitting more than one seat away from each other. The students were more likely to have become friends with people in neighboring seats.
1. Whataretheindependent,dependent,and control variables forthis study?
2. Is the independent variable in this study manipulated as independent measures (aka independent ?groups) or repeated measures? Justify your response.
3. Usingthe“Chart”functioninMicrosoftWord,createabarchartrepresentingtheseresults.Even ?though you don’t know the exact values, you can create a bar chart using made up values that match the reported results.

Psychology and Education

Experimenters took advantage of a natural situation to study the effect of “propinquity,” or close physical position, on friendships. The participants were 40 first- year students who were attending an orientation meeting at their university. None of the freshmen knew each other before the meeting, and they were assigned to sit in one of the 40 classroom seats at random. The researchers recorded who sat by whom. Two months later, they asked each person about which of the other students, among the 40 freshmen at the first meeting, they had become friends with. The researchers compared friendship rates between people sitting next to each other at the first meeting with friendship rates between people sitting more than one seat away from each other. The students were more likely to have become friends with people in neighboring seats.
1. Whataretheindependent,dependent,and control variables forthis study?
2. Is the independent variable in this study manipulated as independent measures (aka independent ?groups) or repeated measures? Justify your response.
3. Usingthe“Chart”functioninMicrosoftWord,createabarchartrepresentingtheseresults.Even ?though you don’t know the exact values, you can create a bar chart using made up values that match the reported results.