Excelling Psychology

Report writing is a necessary skill and one that easily contributes to the student's final marks if learnt correctly. I've already given an orientation to this subject here . It's time to get practical now. Keep in mind that I am discussing the report written after psychological tests and experiments, and not a dissertation or full-fledged paper. Let's look at how the report is written in the APA format, looking step-by-step at the different sections : Introduction What this section is not meant for: Giving lengthy explanations of theories Increasing the length of the report Covering up for lack of knowledge of how to write the other sections What this section is meant for: Explaining why the experiment/test was conducted A succinct review of theories relevant to the present experiment Making evidence-based predictions of expected results from the conduct How this section should be organized (in general): Introduction of the research problem in t...

Psychology is a science and not an art. It fascinates me when students debate over how they can make their report more 'attractive.'This is a very poor objective, for the essence of a good report is its communicative ability and not the creativity of the report writer.  Try an exercise of empathy here. Imagine you are a researcher who has decided to investigate the impact of regular smoking on female adolescents. Now, as a first step in your research, you will look at past studies done in this area, to find out how much is already known, and gauge what is still desired to be known. Suppose you find fifty relevant, published articles on this topic.Now imagine these were all written in different formats, and every writer had decided for him/herself how much to report and how much to omit. You find that some reports cover fifty pages of narratives including the writer's own opinions and struggles with the topic; while others complete the entire report in two paragraphs...

Year after year, there is an incredible fear of statistics from students across Universities. I would expect students to be excited for the subject, for it is such a relief from theory, and is very 'scoring.' On the contrary, students wish it were one subject they did not have to deal with. Why do students fear statistics? There are two answers to this. The first is that it's fear has been hyped beyond measure through the years, and students are not particularly known to pause and think about the rationality of what goes around. The second is that professors fail to teach statistics on two counts - they are unable to present solutions in a clear, step-by-step manner and they are unable to make students see the importance of statistics in the field of Psychology. I remember one of my professors coming into the class and laughing about the fact that she barely knew anything about statistics. She would then open a statistics book every lecture and dictate whatever was w...