PSYC 420 Cognitive Psychology
ARTICLE SUMMARIES OVERVIEW
PURPOSE
In Week 3, provide a summary of the content of two different articles that you have selected as references for your research paper. The articles must be studies that are published in peer reviewed journals. Go to the Columbia College Online library and explore the psychology/behavioral sciences database to find an article. Look at the original research study; do not use a summary of a study from a newspaper, web site, or journal that is not a peer-reviewed source. The papers that you select must have a hypothesis, a method section including a description of the study participants, materials or measures, and procedure or study design; and a results section.
Identify the purpose of the each study and the hypothesis or research question. Provide brief descriptions of the research design, findings, conclusions, and implications of this study, as well as future directions for research suggested by the author(s). Be sure to include a complete bibliographic reference in APA style for the article at the end of your paper.
See the template in the content section to help you organize your summary. You are describing in your own words only, the topic of interest, what the authors expected to find, how they designed a study to test the question or hypothesis, what they found and what the findings mean. Use the questions in the template to complete the assignment. Be sure that you do not rewrite the author’s words when answering the question.
TEMPLATE OVERVIEW
The purpose of the article summary is to help you think critically about psychology research. For your article, format your reference APA style at the top of the page under the title Week 3 Article Summary. Then answer each of the following questions:
1. What are the authors selling to you? (For example, is it a psychotherapy that they developed or that visual processing involves more than one brain area?)
2. What is the hypothesis (research question)?
3. How was this question or hypothesis tested?
o Who was in the sample?
o Was this a convenience sample or were participants randomly selected?
o Were participants randomly assigned to groups or study conditions?
o Which survey or interview measures were used?
o What was the study procedure?
o Did the authors use specialized equipment or a computer program?
o What were the strengths and limitations of this design?
4. What did the researchers find (results)?
5. What did the researchers conclude?
6. What do these findings mean (implications)?
The article summaries are due by Sunday of Week 3.