HPS121 Lab Report

Assessment task overview and rationale

Welcome to your guide to your second assessment task!

DO:Set aside some time to read this mindfully and enthusiastically, and you will be well on your way to writing a good assignment. If questions arise, write down a list of your questions, and post them on the discussion board!

DON’T:Take one look at the length of the document, panic, and read it in a hurry or hide from it for a few weeks. Trust us, this document is your friend, and the unit team is here to help you if anything is new or confusing! In addition to engaging with this document, you will need to attend your weekly one-hour seminars and ask your tutor questions in order to do well on this assignment task.

In your first assessment task, you described the aims of your study, the rationale for your study, and your hypothesis for your study in the Introduction. Then, you described how you planned to test your hypotheses in the Method.

Now, in Assessment task 2 (AT2): Lab Report Part B, described in this document, you will find out what the Results of your study were. Then, you will discuss whether the results aligned with your hypotheses or not, and what you think the potential explanations for your findings may be in the Discussion.

As part of your AT2, you will also resubmit your Introduction and Method (Part A), incorporating some of the feedback from your marker. This allows you the opportunity to utilise your marker’s feedback to improve your lab report writing skills. We have run the analyses for you and will provide you with the appropriate numbers for the Results in this guide, but you will be writing up the Results section and Discussion section as if you analysed the data yourself. This guide provides everything you need to know to get started on your second assessment task, as well as instructions on how to complete the Part A resubmission component.

Why am I writing a lab report?

You might be asking yourself, why am I writing a lab report in psychology? There are two key reasons why writing a lab report is an essential skill for psychological science.

1. To learn how to engage with scientific evidence, and understand what information is trustworthy

   This is achieved by reading and evaluating prior studies and by simulating the experience of conducting your own study, so that you can gain insight into how studies are actually conducted and discover their potential limitations and strengths. Understanding this will help you not just if you choose to become a researcher in the future, but also if you choose to become a psychologist of any kind, because all psychological practice needs to be evidence based, i.e., psychologists help people by using what has been demonstrated to be effective by science. Therefore, you need to be able to understand how to interpret the results of psychological research, and what better way to learn then by simulating the process of conducting research yourself. Even if you choose to not be a psychologist, you will gain a better understanding of how to know what information in the world is trustworthy, which is useful for day-to-day life and in many fields.

   This aligns with ULO 3 for the unit: Demonstrate ability to summarise and critically analyse psychology research

2. To learn how to communicate effectively

   Written communication is one of the most important skills you will develop at university. This lab report will teach you how to synthesise and evaluate information in order to draw your own conclusions and communicate them to the reader. This is a skill that is challenging and takes time to develop, which is why we want to start teaching you this as early as possible.

   This aligns with ULO 4 for the unit: Construct, synthesise, and clearly communicate

Lab report topic

Hopefully we’ve convinced you that writing a lab report is a worthwhile endeavour. Let’s take a deeper look at what exactly you will writing your lab report about.

Background information

In this study, we surveyed a group of Australian students in order to investigate whether the degree to which they experience self-transcendent emotions of awe and gratitude was associated with their wellbeing.

Study information

Data for this study were collected from students in HPS121/HPY713 via an online survey in Weeks 1-2 of the trimester.

Lab report structure

Part B of your lab report includes the following sections, in this exact order: Title page, Abstract, Part A resubmission, Results, Discussion, and References. See below for more details of what is required in each.

Title page

Abstract

Your abstract is a short overview of all the sections in your lab report. For HPS121 students,the abstract has a word count of 200 words, included within the overall word count of 1200.

A good abstract will briefly and concisely answer the following questions:

• Must follow guidelines for an APA style cover page.
• This must be the first page of your assessment and be one page in length.
• Must include a unique title that you come up with to represent the study.
• It must include your unique title, your name, your student number, the unit code and the assessment (AT2: Lab Report Part B), your unit chair, the date you submitted, and the final word count.
• You should also include a page number on each page of the assessment.

  Part A resubmission (not included in the AT2 word count)

  Your marker will have left comments on your submission with asterisks (*) next to them. You can address up to 5 of these comments with asterisks (*) to earn up to 5 points on your assignment. You can address more than 5 points of feedback if you wish, but the maximum number of points that can be awarded is 5.

  You need to use Track Changes via Microsoft Word or Pages (under the Review tab) to indicate where you have made the changes in your assignment, otherwise your marker will not be able to tell what changes you have made. Ensure you follow the below instructions carefully.

  How to make changes to your Introduction and/or Method for resubmission

  You should end up with a document that looks like the following:

  Some students may need to convert their assignment document from Pages to PDF in order to submit it (as specified above, .pages documents are not accepted as they are not readable in the dropbox). Others may simply wish to convert their Word document to PDF out of personal preference. Either way, when you are ready to submit your assignment and need to convert your document (either from Word or Pages) to PDF, please ensure you follow the instructions below to retain your Track Changes.

  If you use another method to convert your document to PDF, your Track Changes will most likely not show, and your marker will not be able to see what changes you have made, and you may receive 0 for the resubmission element. Alternatively, if you have written your assignment in Word, you can simply submit the Word document showing the Track Changes, rather than converting it to PDF.

  Discussion

  The discussion is where you provide an interpretation of your results, integrate them with past literature, and reflect on the limitations and implications of your findings.

  The first paragraph should restate the aim and the findings, and state whether the findings support the hypotheses. Then, there should be one paragraph for each hypothesis/finding that answers the following:

  Then you should have a paragraph that covers at least 2 limitations of your study. You need to not only mention the limitation, but also explain why it is an issue and how exactly it limits the findings. In the same paragraph you should also provide at least 2 directions for future research. These suggestions could be to fix the limitations of the study, or you can suggest logical follow up research questions.

  Finally, you should have a conclusion paragraph that summarizes the key takeaways from your study, i.e., what has been learned from your study and why it is important.

  • What is the topic and why is it important?
  • What is the aim of the study?
  • Who were the participants and what did they do?
  • What were the key findings, and did they support your hypotheses?
  • How do the findings fill a gap in the literature and how might they be useful in the real world?
    1. Copy and paste your Introduction and Method from AT1 into the AT2 template.
    2. Identify the 5 pieces of feedback your marker has left on AT1 that you are going to enact (Note: You should only make changes in line with eligible comments from your marker, i.e., those marked with an asterisk).
    3. When you are ready to enact the 5 pieces of feedback across your Introduction and/or Method, turn on Track Changes using these instructions: How to turn on Track Changes, and make your changes.
    4. When you are ready to work on your Results, Discussion, Abstract, or References, turn off Track Changes using these instructions: How to turn off Track Changes.
    5. List the changes you have made on the title page of the AT2 template, to make it really clear to your marker what they need to look for.
    • Title page: Track Changes turned off; clear list of the 5 pieces of feedback you have addressed across your Introduction and/or Method
    • Abstract: Track Changes turned off
    • Introduction: Track Changes turned on, showing changes
    • Method: Track Changes turned on, showing changes
    • Results: Track Changes turned off
    • Discussion: Track Changes turned off
    1. Open the Word/Pages document
    2. Make sure that Track Changes are set to show “All Markup”
    3. Go to File, then Print, then select Adobe PDF as the printer
    4. Save the PDF and submit to the dropbox
    • Restate the finding: What did you find?
    • Interpretation of the finding: Was does this finding mean in plain terms?
    • Explanation of the finding: Why do you think this finding occurred?
    • Research implications of the finding: Is the finding consistent with past literature?
    • If it is consistent, what does it add that previously literature does not show?
    • If it is not consistent, why might your findings be different from previous and which should we trust?
    • Real-world implications of the finding: How can the findings be used to help people in the real world, or to solve the problem you initially identified?