Instructions Introduction: Carefully read all instructions below before beginning. This assignment is intended to help you advance toward your PLO and will eventually contribute toward your final paper. Choose the article carefully with these goals in mind. It is best to choose articles very relevant to your PLO and more recent articles tend to be preferable. Step-by-Step Instructions: Select an empirical article from a peer-reviewed, scholarly, psychology journal related to your PLO. Google Scholar (Links to an external site.) and PsychINFO (Links to an external site.) are both good places to look for empirical articles. Double-check that the article is from a psychology journal (i.e., social, personality, cross-cultural, experimental) not another discipline (e.g. anthropology, sociology, business). Not sure whether your article is empirical or not? Click here and reference this article for help (Links to an external site.). Read your article carefully. Remember, skip the results section. Everything you need to know from the results section you will get from other sections (i.e., abstract, discussion). Read all other sections (i.e., Abstract, Introduction, Method, and Discussion). Prepare to submit your analysis. For your analysis, you will need to be able to provide the information below. Collect this information prior to starting the quiz. A correctly formatted full-length and in-text citation for the article. A summary of the article including the purpose of the article, its main predictions and findings, the basic methodology used, and at least one important methodological strength and weakness of the design. This summary should be no longer than 350 words. I’ve provided an example (204 words) below to demonstrate the level of detail for reporting. For the example below, if you would like to access the full article, click here (Links to an external site.). Example (204 words): Galinsky, et al. (2003) studied the effect of high levels of psychological power on action taking. In a series of laboratory studies, they presented participants with various scenarios. As a manipulated independent variable, they had some participants complete a writing prompt intended to cause them to feel greater psychological power and then measured behaviors consistent with action taking. In one study, Galinsky et al. (2003) arranged for a fan to be blowing on the participant in an already cold room. As predicted, participants induced to feel greater psychological power were more likely to act by either redirecting or turning off the fan compared with lower power participants. In another study, participants in the high-power condition were, as predicted, more likely to take a second cookie, which was the last on the plate, in a group with two other lower-power participants. An important strength of this study is the high external validity resulting from using very real-world scenarios with high psychological realism. However, the study does by Galinsky et al. (2003) does have a major limitation as all measures were taken within a very short period of the power manipulation. It is unclear then whether these effects are only short term or rather long lasting. Avoid plagiarism. Eventually, these article analyses will become incorporated into the literature review of your final paper. As such, be very careful not to plagiarize. Your summary should contain sufficient in-text citations that it is always clear which article you are talking about. A good rule of thumb is a minimum of two per paragraph if you are only talking about the one article or as often as you switch between sources. It is best to avoid direct quotes altogether (except when providing definitions). Per APA, direct quotes must be cited with the authors’ last name, year, and page number or it is plagiarism. Paraphrase to avoid plagiarism. Remember, paraphrasing is not just making minor edits. It is fundamentally writing the concepts in your own words using your own organization. An explanation of how this article informs your personal learning objective (PLO). Write a 100 to 200 word explanation of how this empirical article contributes to mastery of your PLO. Use this as an opportunity to refine and narrow your interest in your topic so that as you accomplish each article analysis you are also narrowing in on a final paper topic. A 2- to 3-sentence response to the following question, “Based on this article, what are you interested in learning next to keep making progress toward your PLO?”
