A Guide to Writing a Research Report

Design of Your Study

Design: Is this study between or within subjects design? What is the IV and what is the DV?Materials/Apparatus: Briefly describe the tests and other materials relevant to your topic. In this case, describe the stimuli in details. Do not describe the other tests/tasks you did which are unrelated to your topic.Indicate what hypothetical construct each of the materials was intended to measure. Do not describe in this section how the materials were used – that belongs in procedure. Procedure: Outline, step by step, how the data were gathered. Include instructions to participants (these do not have to be verbatim) and any time limits. You should also mention any steps that were taken to control for potential confounds. Your reader should have sufficient information to replicate your study (i.e., run it again for themselves). Describe how tests and tasks were scored. By the end of the section, your reader should be equipped to understand what the scores mean on various measures so that the Results section will make sense. Do not describe procedures for gathering data irrelevant to your topic.Results: Do a basic interpretation of where significant differences or relationships were/were not, and direction of these differences/relationships.-to do this inferential statistics must be interpreted in relation to descriptive statistics: i.e., the descriptive (the means) show DIRECTION (i.e., which group/stimuli was higher/lower, faster/slower, whether a response increased or decreased compared to baseline. But descriptive alone do not show whether these differences in responses/groups are significant). -The inferential stats show SIGNIFICANCE (i.e., significant differences but not the direction of these relationships, which is why you need to report and interpret both). -Use a figure to display meaningful comparisons. Must be in APA format.Discussion: Directly address the hypotheses! - Were the hypotheses confirmed or not? What results indicated this?

- Compare and interpret results in light of previous theory/literature. Are they consistent with previous results? If not, why might this be (alternative explanations for results)? Should also consider alternative explanations to your results based on existing literature even if your hypotheses were met. - Methodological limitations of this study. Explain carefully exactly HOW limitations may have affected the results. Pointing out a possible limitation without explanation of how specifically it might have affected your results is not useful (and will not receive any marks).- Simply stating that because the sample consisted only of uni students, the results of the study are not generalisable to the greater population is NOT a sufficient limitation. Only talk about the “uni student” limitation if you can explain logically and specifically how using this sample may have affected the results in some way, e.g., why uni students would respond differently for words compared to digits. But there will likely be much more relevant limitations on which you could be focusing. - Implications of this study in terms of theory and how these results might be used. - Future research suggestions (may tie into limitations). Include a short—but solid!—con