Psychology 208: Creativity
Weekly Assignments
schedule
Date and Assignment Instructions Individual or Group
Due: 9/6 – Ethics training

Our first assignment probably falls a little out of order in terms of the practice of doing research, but knowing about the ethical treatment of human subjects is an important component of becoming a responsible scientist.  We will talk in class about ethics training in a couple of weeks, but for now, I want you to complete the training course that is required of anyone working with human subjects at Amherst College.  The process should not take too long

  1. Start by clinking the link for the CITI program website.
  2. Click the white ‘Register’ square in the upper right hand corner of the screen.
  3. Enter ‘Amherst College’ in the box labeled ‘To find your organization…’
    1. Click the boxes to indicate that you agree with the terms of service and that are are an affiliate of Amherst College.
    2. Then click the ‘Continue to Create…’ button.
  4. Enter your first and last names and an email address.  Enter a ‘real’ email address.  It does not have to be your amherst.edu address. 
  5. Create a username and password and fill out the security question.
  6. Enter your country of residence.
  7. Answer ‘NO’ for Continuing Education; do what you like as far as receiving marketing stuff from CITI. 
  8. Fill out the information that Amherst wants.  I would enter Co-Investigor for the ‘Role in Research’ question. 
  9. For Question 1, choose ‘Social and Behavioral Sciences (Psychology, Anthropology and Sociology & other social sciences) RCR’.
  10. Choose ‘NO’ for questions 2, 3, and 4.
  11. Click on ‘Complete Registration’.
  12. Click on ‘Finalize Registration’.      
  13. Click on ‘View Courses’ next to Amherst College.
  14. Click on ‘Start Now’ for ‘Social and Behavioral Sciences (Psychology, Anthropology and Sociology & other social sciences) RCR’

Believe it or not, that is not part of the actual training course.  Follow the instructions to complete the five modules for the course.  You’ll read some materials and take some test questions to ensure that you have read and understood the material.  TO COMPLETE THE ASSIGNMENT, you must email me a copy of the completion certificate, which you can download at the end of the course. Good luck.

 Individual
Due: 9/9: Discuss an article Here is a list of things that you should do to prepare to discuss an article:
  1. Identify the main research question or controversy
  2. Identify the competing theories/explanations/answers to the main question or controversy
  3. For an empirical article,
    • describe the experimental method used to address the main question
    • understand the hypothetical or predicted results
    • what were the actual results?
    • what do those results tell us about the main research question?
  4. For a review article,
    • describe the kinds of data that were used to address the main research question
    • identify consistencies and inconsistencies in the data
    • describe the authors' interpretation of the data
  5. Assess strengths and weaknesses in the argument including methods, analysis, and interpretation
 Individual
Due: 9/11: Present an article The list of things you need to do to present an article is more or less the same as the list of things you need to do to discuss an article. The main difference is that you need to develop a clearer plan. You have to link the answers to these questions together into a coherent narrative. That is, you have to walk the audience through the article to help then understand the main points and connect the dots into a coherent whole. Individual
Due: 9/13 – Research Hypothesis

It is time for us to begin to develop our experiments for the semester.  Typically, experimental projects begin with a research hypothesis.  In general, a research hypothesis can be thought of as a statement about the (expected) relationship between two variables: an independent or predictor variable and a dependent variable.  For example, one might hypothesize that there is a relationship between domain knowledge and different types of creativity measures such that more knowledge would increase (or decrease) the number of ideas generated, but decrease (or increase) the novelty of those ideas.  In this case, domain knowledge is the independent variable and the types of creativity measures are the dependent variables.  For this assignment, I am going to ask you to create a research hypothesis that you think has the potential to form the basis for the experimental project that you conduct across the semester.

Understanding what a research hypothesis looks like is part of the job, but you also need to know how to generate a research hypothesis.  Sometimes, research hypotheses flow from observations in the world.  Other times, research hypotheses flow from a careful reading of the literature.  We have done some reading of the literature and you also have some exposure to creativity (both ideas and people) from your experience in the world so you should feel free to draw upon either source of knowledge to help you propose a research hypothesis.  One good place to start would be to go through some of the readings from earlier this week when we looked at some of the ‘big’ questions that motivate creativity researchers.  Your research hypothesis could be a potential answer to one of these ‘big’ questions.

To begin the semester, I want you to present a research hypothesis related to creativity.  It could be about what makes a person/idea/object creative.  It could be about how to foster creative solutions to a problem or how/whether people can be trained to be more creative.  It could be about whether certain personality traits (intelligence? mental illness?) are associated with creativity.  It doesn’t have to be sophisticated or informed by in-depth knowledge.  It could be something you read on the internet, overheard on a bus.  There will be time to do relevant reading in the literature.  There are two things that matter at this point.  First, the hypothesis should be one that interests you.  You need to believe that pursuing an answer to this question might capture your attention for the duration of this course.  Second, it must take the form described above; that is, it must suggest a potential relationship between two variables/sets of variables.  Your assignment should describe the research hypothesis (identifying the independent and dependent variables), where it comes from, and why you are interested in pursuing this question. 

Approximate length: 1 paragraph		 Individual
Due: 9/20 – Annotated Bibliography

The second step in the research process is to consult the literature, but not for the reason that you might think.  Often, students worry that someone has already answered a question.  Although it is likely (and actually desirable) that someone has addressed a question, it is unlikely that they have answered the question definitively.  Doubts and alternative hypotheses always remain.  As well, and more important, smart people may have already given a lot of thought to your question.  They may have generated hypotheses/theories you never considered.  They are likely to have developed research tools you had not imagined.  The goal of your literature review is to see what kinds of work, ideas, and tools other smart people have brought to bear on the question you wish to address.  This will help you refine your thinking about your question and give you ideas for how to pursue an experimental design to address your question. 

For this assignment, I would like you to find a handful of papers (4-6 papers should be about right) along with a description of why each is relevant to your hypothesis.  Does the paper present an interesting/contrasting hypothesis?  Does the paper provide a methodology or empirical tool that you might wish to use?  

Again, 4-6 papers should be enough here, but the number is less important than the relationship of the papers to each other and to your research question.  You’re trying to develop a question; the papers you select for your bibliography should all be related to that question and to each other.  The purpose of this assignment is to locate those papers and describe the relationship among them

Last thing, I want you to practice citing paper properly both in the text and in a reference section at the end of your paper.  To help you, I have included information on how to cite papers using APA style in this document.  The document is split into different sections for different assignments for the semester.  This link will take you to the section for the annotated bibliography with information on how to cite papers in the text and how to create a properly formatted reference section.

Approximate length: 4-6 papers with an explanation of how they relate to one another and a properly formatted reference section

 Individual
Due: 9/27 – Theoretical Proposal

A theoretical proposal takes an research hypothesis and places it within a theoretical framework.  You are not merely writing ‘I think creative people will score high on Openness’.  Instead, you are presenting a body of literature and describing how your research question fits into that literature.  This assignment will serve as a kind of road map for the Introduction of your final written assignment for the semester.  The Introduction provides an overview of the relevant literature, while leading the reader to the specific question that your experiment will address.  As such, it starts out relatively broad (creativity, in general) and funnels down into a specific question (e.g., a specific personality variable that correlates with creativity).  

There are FOUR important components that comprise a theoretical proposal.  The first is an ‘OPENING’ statement. The Opening describes some current state of the literature. For example, if your paper was going to explore how creativity should be measured, your opening statement might be something like the following: ‘Some researchers have proposed that creativity is best measured in terms of divergent thinking and amassed this kind of evidence; then you would describe the supporting evidence. 

The second step is the ‘HOWEVER’ statement.  There has to be some kind of problem in the literature that you identify, For example, you might write, ‘HOWEVER, other researchers have argued that divergent thinking is neither the best nor only measure of creativity; then you would describe the relevant literature supporting the ‘however’.  What comes after the ‘however’ can take many forms.  Here are a few examples:

  • Other researchers have disagreed with this proposal and presented contrasting evidence like this.
  • The methods used to amass this evidence were flawed in an important way.
  • The experiments failed to account for this important variable.
  • No one has yet tried to apply this principle to this new, interesting problem/arena.

After the ‘however’, you need to present a potential ‘RESOLUTION’ to the problem.  The RESOLUTION will fix the problem you identified in the HOWEVER.  The RESOLUTION can take many forms; here are some examples:

  • Pit two competing hypotheses against one another
  • Fix the methodological problem with previous experiments.
  • Introduce a new variable or operationally define an important variable in a new way.
  • Describe a new problem/arena/population that can be addressed.

The, fourth and final piece of your theoretical proposal is the BECAUSE. You need to give the reader (community of creativity scientists) a reason why you are conducting the experiment.  You have to tell the reader what the payoff will be for your experiment.  Again, the format of the BECAUSE is going to depend on the format of the HOWEVER and the RESOLUTION, but here are some illustrative examples:

  • If you are pitting two hypotheses against one another, you could describe the expected results and which theory would be favored by that outcome.
  • You could explain why a modified methodology is a better test of some theoretical proposal.
  • You could explain why introducing a new variable or redefining an old one would be valuable.
  • You could explain why a new subject population would provide a useful test of a theory.

Important point for the BECAUSE: doing something ‘new’ is not enough.  You need to explain why the new variable, subject population, or whatever, is valuable theoretically.

Finally, make sure that you cite papers properly and that you have a properly formatted reference section. Here is a link to a site that will help you get that done.

Approximate length: 2-3 pages and should be done individually. Even though the group has developed the ideas that form the basis for the theoretical proposal together, the assignment should still be done individually because this assignment should form the basis of the Introduction for your final paper, which will be done individually.  IMPORTANT: the Theoretical Proposal and the Introduction are not synonymous.  It would be a VERY BIG mistake to cut and paste this into your final paper as the Introduction. 

 Individual
 9/30: 3MP - Theoretical Proposal

3MP stands for ‘3 Minute Presentation’.  We will do several of these throughout the semester.  The goal is to build the final oral presentation of your paper piece by piece.  Just as the written theoretical proposal will form the basis of the written ‘Introduction’ of your final paper, the ‘3MP Theoretical Proposal’ will form the basis of the Introduction of your final oral presentation.  Given that your presentation is supposed to be 3 minutes and given that the Theoretical Proposal has four sections (opening; however; resolution; because), you might think about devoting one minute to each of the three sections for your 3MP.  The expectation is that you will deliver a power point presentation.  It does not have to have fancy effects or graphics to be good (although a few pictures of kittens wouldn’t hurt).  The point is that you clearly lay out the theoretical basis and justification for your research question.  Again, this will not be the finalized Introduction for your oral presentation at the end of the semester, but it should go a long way towards forming that component of your final assignment.  I think the best/easiest way to build your presentation is as a Google doc (use the slides program). You can also use PowerPoint; here is a link to instructions that should enable you to download PowerPoint to your computer if you don’t already have it.  See me with any questions. 

When your presentation is complete, please save it as a Google doc and share it with me. You MUST do so BEFORE class begins!

Approximate length: 3-5 minutes		 Group
10/4: Preliminary Method

At this point, you and your partner(s) have worked out a common understanding of your theoretical question.  The next step will be to flesh out the details of an experimental paradigm. What will your independent and dependent variables be?  How will you operationally define those variables?  What kinds of stimuli will you use: questionnaires; creativity tasks?  What will your subjects do?  What kind of behaviors will you measure and how will you measure them?  We do have the capacity to use some computers to create/present stimuli, so you should not let a lack of technology inhibit your experimental design.  It makes sense to write the preliminary method using the same format you will use for your final paper.  This link will give you some guidance regarding formatting and the kind of information that you need to include in the Method section. 

Approximately length: 1-3 pages		 Group
10/7: 3MP - Method

Another opportunity to share your work with the class. As with the 3MP for the Theoretical Proposal, you will give a 3-to 5-minute presentation, but this time you will be sharing your preliminary Method with the class. Again, as with the 3MP for the Theoretical Proposal, this subsection of your project will have three components: Participants, Stimuli, and Procedure. You might spend approximately a minute on each, although you will probably be better served devoting more time to the Stimuli and Procedure than to the Participants. Of course, the final decision is up to you.

Approximately length: 3-5 minutes

 Group
10/9: Method Feedback

Nothing like some good old-fashioned feedback to start the day. For this assignment, you will be paired with another group to provide feeback for each other's method presentation. We are not going to focus on the presentation itself, but rather on the method. You should ask:

  • Clarifying questions (e.g., how are you going to measure creativity?)
  • Expository questions (e.g., why did you choose that measure of creativity instead of some other measure?)
  • CONSTRUCTIVE suggestions for improvement (e.g., you should think about adding another measure or control condition)

 Group
10/18: IRB Proposal

Any research project that involves human subjects has to be reviewed and approved by a committee; this committee is usually called an Institutional Review Board (IRB). At Amherst College, the IRB process involves completing a form and submitting it to the IRB. That is what we are going to do. You can download the form here. We will go over how to complete the form in class.

Approximate length: 2 pages

 Group
10/25: Empirical Proposal

The empirical proposal will combine the theoretical proposal with your ‘final’ (for now) methods.  Of course, the methods are subject to some adaptation moving forward, but the empirical proposal will include a statement of the problem, a description of the relevant research, an clear rationale for the experiment (i.e., how your experiment will help address the problem you identify) and a complete Method section. 

To review, the Method section will consist of three subsections:

  • Participants – who will you recruit, how many, and how will you find these folks?
  • Stimuli – what kinds of materials you will need, how many, where you will find them?
  • Method – what the subjects will do from the beginning of the experiment until the end?

The Method section will be pretty close to the Method section for your final paper (you’ll have to change tense from future to past, and update to reflect any details/modifications), but the goal should be to come as close as possible to the final Method section for your final paper. 

Approximate length: 3-5 pages

 Individual
11/1: Analysis Plan b. This assignment is meant to help you once we get to the data analysis section of the course. I am not sure if it is it's worth saying that your analysis plan is a plan for the analyses that you plan to do, but too late now. Hopefully, the remaining instructions will be more helpful.
  1. Start by listing your major research hypotheses; for example:
    • We expect that openness will be associated with increased creativity.
    • We expect engaging in exercise will increase creativity.
  2. The next step is to identify the type of design each of your research hypotheses will draw upon. In general, there are two kinds of research designs that one can employ: observational and experimental.
    • An observational design is one where you measure two variables to see if they are related to one another; for example, will openness be associated with increased creativity.
    • An experimental design is one in which you manipulate a variable - like exercise - to see if those who exercise demonstrate more creativity than those who do not.
  3. Next, you should list the variables of interest for each research hypothesis.
    • If your question is an observational design, list the predictor variable (openness, for example) and the dependent measure (creativity). Note that you should be more specific than 'openness' and 'creativity' at this point. You should list the specific measure of 'openness' (score on your specific measure of openness) and 'creativity' that you collected(e.g., fluency on an AUT task). You should also note that you may have more than one dependent variable for each question (e.g., both fluency and novelty on an AUT).
    • If your question is experimental, list the IV (exercise) and the DV (creativity). Again, you should list the specific measure of ‘openness’ (score on your specific measure of openness) and 'creativity' that you collected (e.g., fluency on an AUT task). You should also note that you may have more than one dependent variable for each question (e.g., both fluency and novelty on an AUT).
  4. Finally, identify the type of analysis that you will employ for each of your questions. In general,
    • observational analyses will use correlation and regression techniques.
    • experimental analyses will use t-tests or ANOVAs.
    This is going to be challenging for most of you, so feel free to ask for advice/guidance.
 Group
???/??: Pilot Results

All that is required here is an informal description of the pilot process and any problems that arose during pilot testing, along with tweaks made to the protocol to address those problems. You also need to send me a file with the pilot data, to confirm that you can download the data and that the information you need is being collected and is retrievable. Here are instructions for how to download data files for both Google Forms and Qualtrics.

Approximate Length: 1-2 paragraphs

 Group
11/08: Raw Data Download a copy of your data from the computer program that you used to enter your data and either share or send it to me. We need this to be ready to start coding your data next week. Group
11/15: Final Paper Introduction

The introduction for your paper should be a closely presented argument based on your group’s theoretical proposal. As in the theoretical proposal you need to accomplish three goals: describe the literature relevant to your question, present the ‘problem’ (the ‘however’) and the means that you hope to use to address the problem.  The main difference between the Introduction and the relevant portions of the theoretical proposal is that the introduction should be more in depth.  You will need to flesh out important details in the argument by describing the empirical evidence that leads to the theoretical conclusions that you are drawing.  What did previous researchers do?  How did previous work lead you to the question that you are asking?  Another way of thinking about the distinction is that the theoretical proposal lays out a line or argument; the Introduction will provide the evidence that supports your line of argument.

Providing evidence will require you to describe the articles you are citing in some detail. Doing so will entail:

  • explaining the research question that motivated the paper
  • Describing the experimental paradigm that was developed to address that research question
  • Outlining the relevant results from the experiment (not ALL the results, only those relevant to your argument)
  • And drawing a theoretical conclusion; that is, an answer to the research question that motivated the paper.

Note that the four bullet points above correspond to the four major sections of an empirical article (Introduction; Method; Results; Discussion), so you can think of your task as providing one or two sentence summaries of these major sections.

The other important thing to keep in mind when writing the Introduction for your paper is that you have to link the articles together into a coherent narrative.  That is, you have to start with the research question that you hope to address and end the introduction with your experiment. So, the Intro has to logically guide the reader from starting point (your research question) to the end point (your experiment).  Come talk to me if you are not sure what the starting point and end point for your Intro should be; we can work that out together if you are uncertain.

Approximate length: 4-6 pages

 Individual
11/22: Descriptive Results

For this week, I would like you to present as much as you can of your analyses. Eventually, we will have a 'final' results section, so the further along you can be at this juncture, the better. Please present the analyses you have done one at a time. For each analysis, describe the question that the analysis was meant to addreess, the type of analysis that you conducted, and the results of those analyses. Include graphs or tables if you think those will be helpful. Try to be as precise as you can about language and formatting (see the Analysis materials page for helpful hints about how to report the results).

For this assignment (but not the final results section), I think it will be helpful to include SPSS output with your descriptions so that I can be sure that you are interpreting and reporting the results accurately.  Again, the further along you are now, the less you will have to do after break.

Approximate length: Hard to say, really.  The presence of graphs and SPSS output can inflate the page count.  In addition to whatever graphs and SPSS output you include, what you really need is a short pagraph a few sentences max, about each analysis. 

Group
12/4: 5MP - Results

Note that this is a 5-minute presentation because presenting your results is going to require you to provide some context. In other words, you are going to have to give the audience some background about what your research question was and remind the audience of the basics of your experimental design. Then, you can provide the basics of your results. You do not need to provide specifics about the analyses for the presentation (that is, you don't have to give F values or t-tests results using p-values and/or other aspects of proper notation. Just describe which results were significant and how that did or did not match up with your predictions. If you have not yet conducted the analysis, you can present the analysis 'plan' (i.e., what kinds of analyses you plan to conduct).

Approximate length: 5 minutes

 Group
12/6: Final Paper Results

For this assignment, your data should be coded and analyses done.  The final step (before putting it all together) will be to write a results section.  There are different ways to approach the Results section, but I’m going to encourage you to adopt the following outline for each analysis in your project:

  1. Describe the question that is being addressed.
  2. Identify the data that are being analyzed, both in the text and by referring to a table or figure.
  3. Specify the type of analysis that is being conducted (t-test, ANOVA, correlation, regression).
  4. Describe the results of the analysis using appropriate statistical notation.
  5. Briefly explain what the analysis suggests (e.g., ‘This analysis indicates that our manipulation did/not affect the subject’s behavior’).

Here are some examples of how to report different types of results using appropriate notation:

Independent Samples t-test:

  • An independent samples t-test indicated that there was a significant difference in school grades between children who watched Sesame Street and children who did not, t (18) = 4.00, SEM = 2.00, p = .008. Children who watched Sesame Street had significantly higher grades (M = 93, SD = 4.71) than children who did not watch the show (M = 85, SD = 4.22).

Paired samples t-test:

  • A paired t-test was conducted to examine whether AC students differ in consumption of fruits and vegetables. Results indicated that AC students do not significantly differ in their report of fruit (M = 2.56, SD = 1.56) versus vegetables (M = 2.48, SD = 1.59), t (119) = 1.02, SEM = 0.08, p = .245.

One-way ANOVA:

  • A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) indicated that children’s memory abilities significantly differed across age groups, F(2, 117) = 3.91, p = 0.023, η2 = 0.06. Post-hoc comparisons indicated that 4 year-old children performed significantly worse (M = 80, SD = 2) than 6 year-old children (M = 92, SD = 3) and 8 year-old children (M= 98). However 6 and 8 year-old children did not differ significantly in memory performance.

Repeated measures ANOVA:

  • A repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted to examine if students differ in the average number of friends they interact with on a daily basis in person, online, and on their cell phone. Results indicated a significant effect of type of interaction on number of interactions, F(2,112)=11.90, p=.021, η2 = 0.12. Post-hoc tests indicated that students report interacting with significantly more friends in person (M = 15) than online (M = 8) or on their cell phones (M = 6). Frequency of interactions did not significantly differ online and on cell phones.

Factorial ANOVA:

  • A 2x2 ANOVA was conducted to examine whether memory scores were influenced by clinical diagnosis (ADHD vs. Non-ADHD) and age (Preschool vs. High School). The analysis indicated that there was an overall main effect, F (3, 16) = 15.30, p = .014, suggesting that independent variables influenced memory scores.  There was a significant effect of clinical diagnosis, F (1, 16) = 45.00, p = .004, with children with ADHD performing significantly more poorly (M = 70, than control children (M = 85).  There also was a main effect of age, F (1, 16) = 13.41, p = .045. Preschool children performed significantly worse (M = 75) than high schoolers (M = 89) on the memory test. Finally, the interaction effect was significant, F (1, 16) = 13.48, p = .029. A plot indicated that preschoolers with ADHD were substantially lower in memory ability (M = 70, SD = 15) than preschoolers without ADHD (M = 80, SD = 8), but in high school, there was less difference in memory ability for youth with (M = 88, SD = 12) and without ADHD (M = 90, SD = 15).

Correlation

  • The amount of time spent analyzing data in lab is significantly correlated with students’ exam scores (r = .45, p = .003); the more time students spend analyzing the higher their exam scores tend to be. The number of cups of coffee students’ drink is not significantly correlated with exam scores (r = -.03, p = .678).

Simple Regression:

  • A simple regression indicated that hours exercised explained a significant amount of the variance in veggies eaten F (1, 117) = 6.272, p = .014, r2 = .051. The r2 indicates that the amount a student exercises explains 5.1% of the variance in veggies eaten. The slope of the regression equation was significant (b= .058, p =.014) and indicated that the more people exercise the more veggies they eat.

Multiple regression:

  • A multiple regression analysis indicated that physical aggression and peer victimization explained a significant amount of the variance in self-esteem scores, F (2, 97) = 14.64, p < .05, R2 = .232. The R2 indicates that aggression and peer victimization together explain 23.3% of the variance in self-esteem. The slope of the regression equation was not significant for physical aggression (β = .019, p =.851) but was significant for peer victimization (β = -.491, p < .001) and suggests that the more children are victimized, the lower their self-esteem is predicted to be.

Approximate Length: The results section will vary experiment by experiment, so it’s hard to give a page range.

 Group
??/??: 3MP - Conclusion

OK.  We are thiiiiiiiiis close!  All that is left is to reflect on what we have done and figure out what it all means.  Did your results match your predictions?  If so, what does that tell us about our original research question and/or about creativity in general?  Do NOT despair if your results failed to match your predictions.  That’s OK.  It’s normal.  But, you can still reflect on why your results failed to match your predictions.  Was there something wrong with your experimental design?  The subject population?  Was your conceptualization of creativity or your choice for how to measure creativity at fault?  Ideally, you would still hope to draw some conclusions about the nature of creativity from your experience even if your results were not what you expected.

This section will form the basis for your discussion, so you want to provide a quick overview of what you expected and why.  Then, you want to describe how well your results matched your predictions.  Then you want to explain any discrepancies between your data and your expectations along with the conclusions you can draw about your original research question and/or creativity in general.

Approximate length: 3-5 minutes

 Group
12/13: Final Paper Discussion The Discussion section of your paper should satisfy the following five goals:
  1. Start with a brief overview of your experiment including the question that it was designed to address and the methodology that you employed to address that question.  You might also provide a brief reminder of the experimental hypotheses that guided your design.
  2. Next, provide an overview of the experimental results.  You do not simply want to repeat the results section.  Your job her is to place the data in an interpretive context; that is, you want to tell the reader what the results mean.  Did they confirm your experimental hypotheses or not?  What does the pattern of results tell us about the larger question that your experiment was designed to address.  Even if your results are not significant, you should have something to say about the research question.  Perhaps you will conclude that your expectations were incorrect, or maybe the problem was some aspect of the experimental design and you are sticking to your original view.
  3. After that, you want to bring the lens out more broadly to focus on creativity rather than your experiment.  Do your results tell us anything about creativity?  Do we need to think about the definition of creativity differently?  Do we need to think about what kinds of people, experiences, or contexts are associated with greater/less creativity?  Here is a place for you to try to make a strong statement about some aspect of creativity informed by both your reading of the literature and your experience building and conducting this experiment.
  4. You know what is coming next: limitations and future research.  Identify aspects of the experimental design that were problematic and how you might address them in a future study.  It is not enough to say that your sample was not diverse; you need to explain why the lack of diversity might have influenced the results of your experiment.  That is, you need an argument for why your limitation actually affected the results and therefore the conclusion that should have been drawn from your experiment.  It’s not enough to say that your sample size was too small.  That’s a given.  Explain why the size of your sample might have affected your conclusions.
  5. The final step in your paper is some kind of take-home message.  A summary statement of what overall conclusions can be drawn on the basis of the experiment and your reading of the literature.
 Individual
12/9-12/11: Final Presentations

You’ve almost made it (!!!) and this assignment should be fairly easy.  I want you to give a final oral presentation that describes the whole project from beginning to end.  Fortunately, you have been creating the building blocks for this assignment all semester long.  All you need to do now is to weave the presentations you have been doing all semester into a seamless whole.  You have to make sure that the pieces all fit together – they were built separately.  And you also need to make sure that the message is consistent.  It is likely that the project evolved over the course of the semester so some of the original objectives of the project may have shifted.  So, you probably need to go back and review your earlier presentations to make sure they are all aligned with the current interpretation of your experiment. 

Approximate length: 14 minutes ± 1 minute.  We need to get all of the project squeezed into two day, so 15 minutes is the absolute max.  At the same time, I wouldn’t go too much shorter as you have a semester’s worth of ground to cover.

  
12/19: Final Papers Due

Your final assignment for the semester will be to construct an APA-style report for your experiment.  Everyone will completely this written assignment independently, even though your projects will be conducted in groups.  Again, the overall goal of the course is to give you an opportunity to work through a research problem from start to finish.  This will be the culmination of the project – the place where you demonstrate the intellectual and empirical skills that you have employed across the semester. 

Your paper will include the following components:

  • Title Page: which includes the paper title, author’s name, academic institution, and contact information.  All should be centered with the Title, name and academic institution at the top of the page and the contact information at the bottom. 
  • Abstract: a brief (200 words for this assignment) overview of the research question, the experiment, the results, and your interpretation of your data. The Abstract should appear on its own page.
  • Introduction: The introduction presents related work in the field and the motivation for doing the experiment in question.  It provides the reader with background information to help the reader understand why you chose to pursue the research question at the heart of your study.  It places your experiment into an intellectual context.  It describes both the theoretical and empirical questions that your experiment was designed to address.  One important point for your this assignment that is not necessarily a required in a 'typical' introduction: You MUST include an explicit statement about what creativity is. This definition should draw upon the reading and thinking you have done all semester long. The Introduction starts on a new page with no heading. Just start typing the Introduction
  • Method: The method (again, please note there is no ‘s’ at the end of the word method) section provides demographic information about the subjects used in your experiment, and describes the materials and procedures used to conduct the experiment.  The word Method should be centered as a the heading for this section.
  • Results: The results section presents the statistical analyses used to evaluate the data.  You will report the results of your statistical analyses supported by tables and graphs as needed. The word Results should be centered as the heading for this section.
  • Discussion:  The discussion section presents the empirical and theoretical significance of the data.  How do the data that you collected relate to the theoretical and empirical questions that motivated the experiment?  What do the data tell us about cognition? The word Discussion should be centered as the heading for this section.
  • References: The references section lists the works cited in the other four sections.  The reference section should start on a new page. The word Reference should be centered at the top of the page as the heading for this section.

Click here for a word document that shows the proper formating for the various sections of your paper. Note that there is not an extra space between headings (i.e., no extra space between the end of the Introduction and the start of the Method).

As the semester has slowly ground along, we have worked on each of the major sections of the final paper so there should not be a lot left to do.  Other than polishing the Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion, and updating the reference section, there will be a handful of final tasks for you to do:

  1. Create a title page.  See instruction above.
  2. Include a running head for your paper. This is a three or four word description of your experiment (e.g., 'Creativity and stress'). Creating a header varies a little depending on whether you are working in Word or Google Docs, but clicking the Insert menu and then Header (or something close to that) will probably get it done. See me if you are struggling with this.
  3. Write an abstract.  This is a brief synopsis of the whole paper.  Think about writing one- or two-sentence summaries of each major section of the paper (Intro; Method; Results; Discussion).  That should get you where you need to be.
  4. You will need to add one final section to your discussion that should be a reflection on the project as a whole.  I want you to think about what you learned about conducting behavioral research over the course of the semester.  What parts of the process were more difficult than you anticipated?  How did you feel about the end product?  What might you have done differently if you had more time?  What parts were more interesting, exciting, or fun than you expected?  There are two ways to approach this section.  The first is to write it for my benefit.  That would imply that you would write about how great everything was and how you learned a ton about research and cannot wait to pursue a career as a research scientist.  The second way would be to write this part of the final assignment for your benefit: to help you reflect on the experience to consolidate what you can take away from the semester.  Obviously, I want you to adopt the second approach.  You can tell me how great the semester was (or how it failed to meet expectations) in the end-of-semester course evaluations.  For now, focus on your own experience for your own learning.

Approximately length: 12-14 pages

 Individual

Course Schedule