Your paper will include the following components:

• Title Page: which includes the paper title, author’s name, academic institution, and contact information. 
• Abstract: a brief (200 words for this assignment) overview of the research question, the experiment, the results, and your interpretation of your data.
• 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. 
• Method: The method (notice 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. 
• Results: The results section usually presents the statistical analyses used to evaluate the data.  Many folks in this class have not taken statistics, so I’m not going to require you to report the results of any statistical analyses.  Instead, the results section for your paper will include a graph of the relevant data plus a description of the important results displayed in the graph.
• 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?
• References: The references section lists the works cited in the other four sections. 

The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association is the style guide for the field; a copy of the APA manual is available on reserve in the Science Library.   I encourage you to read pages 10-30, which present a thorough, but concise overview of the purposes of the major sections of a journal article.  In addition, I have tried to boil down the 400 plus pages of the style guide to a more manageable length that highlights the aspects of APA style that are most important for this assignment.  My primer on APA style can be downloaded here.  To be clear, your paper must conform to APA-style.  One of the goals of the assignment is to help you learn how journal articles are structured so that you will be a more effective reader in the future.  Writing within the style will help you become a better reader.  I will be happy to answer any questions that you have, so don't hesitate to contact me. Failure to comply with the guidelines provided in the Style Guides will be penalized heavily.

The first step in completing the assignment is to select one of the CogLab experiments to serve as the basis of your paper.  Once you have selected the experiment, you need to identify the important theoretical questions that the experiment was designed to address.  The CogLab site will help you as it includes background information on each experiment.  Once you have identified the research question, use PsycInfo to locate literature related to your research question.  Once again, the CogLab site will be helpful as it usually cites one or more papers related to each experiment.  The goal here is not simply to find a handful of papers related to your topic.  It is crucial that you find papers that you can link together into a narrative that leads the reader from your major theoretical question, to the specific experiment that you are going to present in the Method and Results sections. For example, you might use the introduction to present a particular theoretical explanation for an important cognitive phenomenon.  In this case, your introduction would discuss experiments/data that led to that theoretical proposal and explain how your experiment provides a further test of the theory.  You might use the introduction to present two competing theories for a phenomenon and explain how your experiment will help determine which theory is more viable.  Writing the introduction should be the major thrust of the assignment; the majority of your time and intellectual energy should be spent making sure that your introduction presents a rationale for why your experiment was conducted.  You will probably need to do some additional reading (hint-hint) to present a complete picture of the issues surrounding your selected experiment.  One source for background literature is PsychInfo.  To get to PsychInfo, go to the main library page.  Here is a link to the PsycInfo database; contact me if you have questions about how to use PsycInfo but note that there will also be information sessions offered by the library. You can search either by author (try the authors of the paper in question), or by subject.  Another good source for background literature is your textbook.  However, you may NOT use your textbook, itself, as a source.  You should only use it as a way to find primary sources that are of interest. 

By contrast, the Method section and Results section should be much less of a focus.  Follow the guidelines in the APA style guide and my APA primer for the Method section; the goal is to describe how the experiment was conducted so that someone else could re-create your experimental methodology.  For the results section, include a graph or table of the data generated by the class along with a description of the important patterns in the data.  I have constructed some simple graphs that you can download; you can also download a graph from CogLab, itself.

The Discussion section begins by summarizing the project and explaining the implications of the results.  You should be sure to compare the results obtained (or expected) with those reported in the literature.  Discuss potential reasons for the discrepancies.  You should also relate the findings to the main question/issues presented in the introduction. Do the data support or contradict the theoretical proposals laid out in the Introduction? Finally, the discussion should touch on broader issues.  For example, what implications does this research have for cognitive psychology or memory research, in general?  What are the limitations of the study, and more importantly, how might you overcome these limitations yourself?  Would correcting these limitations alter the theoretical interpretation of the data?  What other questions does the study raise?  How might you design an experiment to answer those questions?  You also might discuss what implications this study has in the ‘real-world’.  Remember that all great scientists are great storytellers.  They use empirical data to construct a story of how the world works.  That is what you want to do in the Discussion.  Create a story (constrained by your data) about how some cognitive phenomenon works.  After the introduction, this is the second most important part of your paper.

Shortly after the first paper assignment is due, I will send you a paper written by one of your colleagues.  You will not know the identity of the author, nor will you know the identity of the person who reviewed your paper (that way, we can all be friends when the process is done).  You should read and evaluate the paper critically.  Your job is to provide the author with feedback that will help them revise the paper for the final paper assignment.   I have prepared a set of questions to help focus your review (click here); please answer the questions as best you can.  Although I want your review to be critical, it should also be respectful.  Don’t gloss over problems, but be careful not to belittle the author.  After all, it is very likely that your reviewer will identify many of the same problems in your paper.  Also, be generous with praise when it is appropriate.  Mention strengths as prominently and forcefully as you mention weaknesses. 

Ideally, you will benefit from this assignment in two ways.  First, the feedback you get about your paper will help you revise it for the final paper assignment.  Second, the experience of critiquing another writer will give you a better understanding of the challenges a reader faces when approaching an unfamiliar text.  We are often too close to our own writing to see it clearly.  Learning to evaluate your own text from the reader’s perspective will help you diagnose problems that would otherwise remain transparent.