The purpose of this assignment is to get you comfortable with reading and understanding scientific research articles. For this assignment, you will need to access the articles electronically through Blackboard Vista. On the main content page, you should see a folder labeled “Articles for Review.” Inside this folder are two or three articles. These are the ONLY articles that you may use for this assignment. Select ONE of these articles to review.
Read the article through once, to get the idea of what it is about. Then read it again, keeping in mind the review sections described below. Article reviews should be typed in 12pt Times New Roman Font, single-spaced. Your review should be between 2-3 pages, stapled. Each section should be clearly labeled as below and must be in outline format (follow this handout). Be sure to proofread for spelling and grammar.
Your review needs to include the following sections:
Reference
The reference of the article needs to be in APA style.
Study Design
For this portion of the article review, you need to specify what type of study was conducted.
Variables
Independent variables are things like the conditions participants are assigned to in an experimental study; predictor variables are the things the researchers use to predict an outcome but that can’t necessarily be manipulated (like self-esteem or education level) and are in a correlational or longitudinal study. Dependent or criterion variables are outcome variables; the term “dependent variable” refers specifically to outcomes in experimental studies whereas the term “criterion variable” refers to outcomes in correlational studies.
Operational Definitions of Variables
These involve defining any terms or concepts that are central variables in the study. For example, if in the article you reviewed, stereotype threat was a predictor variable, it would be one term you would need to provide an operational definition for.
Hypotheses
What did the researchers predict? What did they expect to happen? All studies have at least 1 hypothesis, and many have quite a few more than that. Remember that the study hypothesis will involve predictions about the variables.
Results
What are the main findings? You should have at least 1 result for each hypothesis. You also need to indicate whether the result supports or disconfirms a hypothesis.
Conclusions
A good place to look for conclusions is in the discussion section, usually toward the end of the article.
Critique
Typically researchers acknowledge limitations to their own work (in the discussion section), but there may be some things that you notice that could be a problem for the study. For example, were the participants mostly women (so we don’t know if men would respond the same way)?