Describe the attributes of an experimental research design.

#1 Online Psychology Lab – Reaction Time

The Online Psychological Laboratory (OPL) will be used for the Research Report (See last page ) and Research Poster: For the research report and poster you will use the data (See the excel spreadsheet) set provided by me. Doing this online experiment allows you to experience the experiment so you are familiar with the procedures. You will need these details when you write your report.

You will do this experiment so you have an idea of what it is, how it works and what your participants went through. The data you will actually analyze for your project will be given to you by me.

The lab is found at Reaction Time Lab (look below). You can also find it by going through this: Content – Class Resources – Psychology Learning Tools – Psychology Labs – Reaction Time Lab

If needed, use class ID 6341

Comment with your average reaction time.

week4 psyc 300

Week 2 : Research Project Topic/ Hypothesis

You have a choice in how you approach this Research Report(look at the last page) . First read the project instructions, then complete this discussion.

Your hypothesis and topic determines what you choose to analyze. You could be interested in reaction time and age so you analyze the three tasks’ results by age.

You may be interested in gender differences or even gender by age differences.

You may be interested in something else, like if the participant was an athlete or not. You can create a new variable in the Research Report data (see attachment) and put a 1 if the participant was an athlete and a 0 if not. Then you can analyze the data by that grouping.

You could make up a new variable for how many drinks the participant had prior to doing the lab. You could see if there was a correlation between the number of drinks and the time they spent on the lab.

Your choice! Compose your response to this discussion with your name as the subject. Describe your research idea and topic and what your hypothesis is. Also tell me how you plan (or think you might plan) to analyze the data . Its ok if you are not sure about this- we will discuss it and I will give you some guidance if necessary.

For example: my research idea is about whether or not age correlates to reaction time. I am only going to use task 1. My hypothesis is that as people get older, their reaction time increases, they get slower. I will set up the data in two columns and run a pearson correlation of time by age using SPSS. This is a very simple example- I expect your idea to be a little more interesting!

Note: There were three tasks in the lab- 1) simple reaction time task 2) a go/no go reaction task and 3) a choice reaction time task. You only need to pick one.

Also, please use at least 50 subjects in each group.

# 3 Discussion board post

Describe the attributes of an experimental research design.

Then, decide whether each of the following topics could be studied using an experimental research design and then explain why or why not.

a. Effect of parietal lobe damage on people’s ability to do basic arithmetic.

b. Effect of being clinically depressed on the number of close friendships people have.

c. Effect of group training on the social skills of teenagers with Asperger’s syndrome.

d. Effect of paying people to take an IQ test on their performance on that test.

** Post must be over 250 words.

Research Report

For this assignment, you will participate in an online experiment on reaction time located within the psychology learning tools”. Once you have completed the experiment you will need to analyze data (I will give you data) and write a lab report (7- 10 pages) in APA style consisting of the following sections:

· Title Page

· Abstract

· Introduction

· Method

· Results

· Discussion

· References

Just like the mini lab report, you will participate in the online experiment so you know what the experiment is like. You will be given the data to analyze.

Here is the data file:Data

You will write the report as if you were the researcher conducting the experiment. You have some options in your research question for this project. The data you are given includes the gender and age of the participants as well as three columns of results data (from 3 tasks). If you have a particular interest and want to modify the data, you have that choice. We will talk about this in week 4.

Careful attention must be paid to APA style as it represents a significant portion of your grade for the paper and is an intended learning outcome for the course. At the end of the term you will submit your completed paper to your assignment folder.

Here is the grading rubric for the paper: Rubric