A Guide to Coursework in Psychology

Eamon Fulcher

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781135421410
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Ever had difficulty choosing a research project?

Ever wondered how your work will be marked?

This book will help students to understand the coursework specifications and marking criteria for a number of key exam boards, including; AQA (specification A and B), OCR, EDEXCEL and SQA. It provides specific and highly relevant advice on how to maximise achievement in coursework. Guidance is offered on how best to choose a research project, through to practical advice on how to carry out research and write up reports. Topics to be avoided are also considered and advice on how to navigate the difficulties and avoid common pitfalls provided.

Key issues covered include:

* An overview of the main methods of investigation in psychology

* Data analysis, including how to present data in Word and Excel and how best to comment on it

* How to draw conclusions from data and create inferential statistics.

Incorporating a series of examples, including an investigation from start to finish, and a laboratory experiment, this book provides clear, hands-on advice. It will be an invaluable tool for GCSE, AS and A2 students, helping them to maintain their motivation through coursework assignments and to achieve their potential.

1
Introduction to coursework in psychology

The specifications

The specifications – coursework requirements and the marking criteria – for a number of GCSE, AS, and A2 courses are summarised in Appendix 1. Read the text relating to your course to find out what you have to do and how your work will be marked. It provides you with the coursework details for the following courses/specifications:

• AQA GCSE Psychology
• AQA GCE AS/A2 Psychology (Specification A)
• AQA GCE AS/A2 Psychology (Specification B)
• OCR GCSE Psychology
• OCR GCE AS/A2 Psychology
• EDEXCEL GCE AS/A2 Psychology
• SQA Higher Psychology

Having identified the requirements for your course you can begin reading Chapters 2, 3, and 4 as well as Chapter 9 (20 ideas for an investigation), as these will help you choose a topic for your investigation. As you develop your investigation, read the first example report in Chapter 8 since this gives a blow-by-blow account of all the details of a project from choice of topic, to preparation, to the finished product. Chapters 5 and 6 are designed to help you analyse your data and report your results. When you are ready to begin writing up your report, consult Chapter 7, which helps you lay out your work and shows you what to put in each section of the report. It also gives advice on how to write academically and common pitfalls to avoid.

It is no mean feat to carry out an investigation in psychology, but if you adhere to the advice in this book the task will be made much easier for you (and you may even enjoy it!). However, before you delve into the details of the specification for your course, here are a few important points you should know.

Maximising your effort

When teachers, tutors, or examination boards design a course they will also design ways of assessing students, such as through exams and coursework. Nowadays, exam boards and universities have to make every assessment method transparent. This means that they have to state what the aims of the course are, what kinds of skills students are likely to acquire, what the marking criteria will be for each item of assessment, and much more. For you, the student, this is a very good thing. First, it should instil confidence in you that the course and the assessment procedures have been well thought out and hence are appropriate for the subject you are studying. Second, it lets you know what the examiner will be looking for when they mark your work. The exam boards publish the marking criteria they will use for all candidates’ work. They indicate precisely how many marks will be given for each feature of the coursework. Knowing this will help you to maximise your effort.

The way you should maximise your effort in doing your coursework is by directing your effort towards the things that matter to your examiner. There is no point in writing ten long paragraphs when only two marks are up for grabs or in writing only two paragraphs when twenty marks are available. By studying and knowing the marking criteria, you will find out where the goal posts are. Hence, you will know where you should be aiming your shots.

So, by reading Appendix 1, you can identify what the requirements are for your course. Knowing what will be expected of you is your first step in trying to obtain the best marks for all of the effort you will be putting into your course. Having read the section relevant to your course you can then refer to the most appropriate chapters and sections in the book. Since not all courses have exactly the same marking criteria (though they are quite similar), you should use the course guide when deciding how the parts of the book will be most helpful to you.

Most items of coursework at GSE and GCSE levels involve an investigation. For this you are required to design a research investigation, to collect data, to analyse the data, to interpret the results, and to evaluate the study. You submit a practical report of your investigation. There are standard ways of doing research and report writing in psychology, and the aim of this book is to give you a solid grounding in them. For this type of assessment, every chapter is relevant. However, some items of assessment do not involve the production of a practical report. In these cases, the nature of the assessment is discussed differently and you are referred to specific chapters for further assistance.

Motivating yourself

This is a good place to offer you some advice about how to motivate yourself (or keep your motivation going). There’s no lengthy diatribe about how important it is that you should do you best and there is no attempt to make you feel guilty – just six simple rules:

1. Don’t be a minimalist. Don’t put in just a token effort. Marks worth having require effort worth giving.
2. Don’t be superficial. Beware of putting all your effort into your presentation. A report has to have substance, and no amount of glitter and unnecessary decoration can disguise its absence.
3. Don’t be a perfectionist. Perfectionism leads to a never-ending cycle of despair. Accept your faults and failings, and everyone else’s for that matter, because we all have them. Do your best and not the best that’s ever been done.
4. Be selfish. The person who has the most to gain from all that effort is YOU! No one is going to fly half way across the world, get into a taxi, knock on your door, and ask you to play for Real Madrid (well, unless you’re David Beckham. OK, so I forgot about Michael Owen and Jonathon Woodgate, but that’s still only three people out of how many millions?). If you want to get on then you have to get on with it yourself.
5. Impress yourself. You should try not to do things to impress others because then you are at their mercy – you are like the little pigeon sitting in B.F. Skinner’s reinforcement chamber waiting for them to issue their small reward for all your hard work. You should be the master of your own internal reward system. Try to impress yourself and then reward yourself in ways that only you know best.
6. Don’t let time pass you by. Work out a timetable for each stage of the investigation. Give yourself deadlines and try to stick to them, but don’t beat yourself up if you have missed a deadline, just put in a few extra hours of work.

A note on plagiarism

Before we begin discussing the details of a practical investigation, I want to address the issue of plagiarism. The report you submit is expected to be your own. Although some courses allow you to collect your data in groups, the report should be written in your own words. If it is not, then you have committed plagiarism, and if your plagiarism is detected you will fail automatically. There are two kinds of plagiarism. The first is a minor transgression where you have copied a paragraph or two from a book or some other source and have not acknowledged the source. As far as the reader is aware, the text is your own since you have not stated otherwise. What you should do in this case is to consider the paragraph as a quotation, insert quotation marks around the paragraph, and mention the author, year of publication, and the page numbers. Here’s an example of plagiarism (the plagiarised text is underlined):

Working memory was first outlined by Baddeley and Hitch (1974). It is a model of short-term or immediate memory, rather than a model of long-term memory. Understanding how we temporarily store and process information is fundamental to understanding almost all other aspects of cognition. The model was designed to account for a number of research findings.

The correct way to present the text is like this:

Working memory was first outlined by Baddeley and Hitch (1974). It is a model of short-term or immediate memory, rather than a model of long-term memory. According to Andrade (2001), “Understanding how we temporarily store and process information is fundamental to understanding almost all other aspects of cognition” (p. 766). The model was designed to account for a number of research findings.

Very often, such plagiarism is difficult to detect. However when the grammar and the sophistication of the writing suddenly and quite obviously improve, the reader becomes highly suspicious. However, this form of plagiarism is not considered as serious as the second form. This is when a substantial part of the report, or even its entirety, is not the work of the student. This can include: copying whole sec- tions of your report from another source, making up your data, downloading a complete report from the internet and claiming it as your own, and so on.

To give an example, I was once marking a report on an experiment in attention. I will not tell you how I became suspicious, but reading the introduction I suspected that this was not the student’s work. I logged onto a database of psychological research reports and typed a phrase from the report into the search engine. Two items by the same authors were listed in the search results. One of these items was a report in a psychological journal I knew was held in my college library. I obtained a photocopy of the journal article and compared it with the student’s report. I was a little shocked when I did this because it was not a simple case of copying several paragraphs or chunks from the report – the report had been copied in its entirety. Needless to say, the student failed the course. Some students may think it rather mean of me that I publicised the plagiarism to the exam board without first talking to the student or showing some charity. However, it would have been extremely unfair to other students, who had put a great amount of effort into their coursework, not to report this case – I would have done a disservice to those hard-working students. Moreover, since the report was so well written, had I not detected it the student would have got top marks, which would not reflect the student’s true ability.

Detecting plagiarism is much easier than many students seem to realise. Every time I have suspected that a piece of work is not genuine, my suspicions have been confirmed. Remember that markers will have read many thousands of student essays and reports. They can tell the genuine article. Furthermore, examiners have access to large databases of reports that you or your school or college may not have access to. Some students may be tempted to pay for essays or reports that they can download from the internet. These students should be aware that examiners too may have purchased membership to such sites.

To sum up, plagiarism is not worth the risk. It is far easier to detect than you may think and the punishment is severe.

The contents of this book

• Your first task is to read the specification (in Appendix 1) that relates to your course and to familiarise yourself with what is required.
• Chapter 2 discusses how to approach choosing a topic for your investigation. There is more than one way to do this and some you will find more appealing than others. Without a clear approach you can waste hours of your precious study time flitting from one idea to another. This chapter shows you how to focus your efforts and come up with a good design.
• Chapter 3 introduces the scientific method and Chapter 4 outlines the different research designs available to you, such as:
  • The laboratory experiment
  • The natural or field experiment
  • Quasi-experimental designs
  • The correlational design
  • Questionnaires
  • Surveys
  • Observational designs
  • Content analysis

Some guidance is given, with examples, on how to carry out each of the above designs, how to gather data, and the key advantages and disadvantages of each design.

• Chapter 5 covers the thorny issue of data analysis. Detailed guidance is provided that shows you:
  • How to calculate descriptive statistics;
  • How to create tables in Microsoft Word;
  • How to create graphs for your report in Excel;
  • How to draw preliminary conclusions from descriptive data.
• Chapter 6 covers different types of data you can collect, different types of experimental designs, the logic of using inferential statistics to test hypotheses, and the issue of statistical significance.
  Each of the most commonly used tests is described (with worked examples). These are:
  • The sign test
  • The Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed ranks test
  • The Mann-Whitney U test
  • The t-tests
  • Spearman’s rho
  • The chi-square test
• Chapter 7 discusses how to write up your research in the correct format. It covers everything from how to choose the title for your report, to ways of adhering to the word limit (and what to do if your first draft is over the limit).
• Chapter 8 provides two full reports. For the first report the study is described in detail from the first ideas the student had, to how she overcame a number of problems in the design and organisation of the materials used in the study. The way she approached the wri...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• 1 Introduction to coursework in psychology
• 2 How to choose a research topic
• 3 Research inpsychology
• 4 Investigative methods
• 5 Data analysis
• 6 Inferential statistics
• 7 Writing your report
• 8 Example reports
• 9 20 ideas for an investigation
• References
• Appendix 1 Coursework specifications
• Appendix 2