Research Methods - Psychology - Study Guide
Exam 1 Lecture Review
Research Methods II, Spring 2010
The first exam in this course will be on Tuesday, February 16th, and will cover Leary Chapters 2, 8, 9, and 10. It will include material from both the lectures and the text; items will be drawn roughly equally from the two sources. Please note that you are responsible for ALL material in these readings, whether it was covered in lecture or not (hint: don’t ignore the little “side boxes”). The exam will include a variety of question formats, including multiple-choice questions, definition/fill-in-the-blank questions, and some short answer questions. These formats are used in order to be fair to all students, some of whom are better at one type of question than another (i.e., so no one is penalized because they have trouble with a particular question format). Please come to the exam a little early if at all possible so we can get started right away—an hour and 15 minutes goes by quickly, and you will need all of that time to work on the exam.
When studying, concentrate both on mastering the terms and concepts in the various chapters (i.e., knowing definitions, knowing similarities and differences among terms) and on applying the terms and concepts (i.e., propose thought questions to yourself and try to answer them following the concepts in the chapters; e.g., "What are the steps in conducting a matched-subjects design?", "What are possible sources of error and confound variance in an experiment?"). Be sure to encode concepts completely; you should know them so clearly that you can recall them with ease (in other words, don’t count on being able to recognize them). Also, you should be able to give unambiguous, detailed definitions that are acceptable to psychologists, rather than a layperson’s definition. For example, if you are asked to define “internal validity”, saying “the opposite of external validity” or “important to achieve in an experiment” or “getting true results” would not earn as
Research Methods II, Spring 2010
The first exam in this course will be on Tuesday, February 16th, and will cover Leary Chapters 2, 8, 9, and 10. It will include material from both the lectures and the text; items will be drawn roughly equally from the two sources. Please note that you are responsible for ALL material in these readings, whether it was covered in lecture or not (hint: don’t ignore the little “side boxes”). The exam will include a variety of question formats, including multiple-choice questions, definition/fill-in-the-blank questions, and some short answer questions. These formats are used in order to be fair to all students, some of whom are better at one type of question than another (i.e., so no one is penalized because they have trouble with a particular question format). Please come to the exam a little early if at all possible so we can get started right away—an hour and 15 minutes goes by quickly, and you will need all of that time to work on the exam.
When studying, concentrate both on mastering the terms and concepts in the various chapters (i.e., knowing definitions, knowing similarities and differences among terms) and on applying the terms and concepts (i.e., propose thought questions to yourself and try to answer them following the concepts in the chapters; e.g., "What are the steps in conducting a matched-subjects design?", "What are possible sources of error and confound variance in an experiment?"). Be sure to encode concepts completely; you should know them so clearly that you can recall them with ease (in other words, don’t count on being able to recognize them). Also, you should be able to give unambiguous, detailed definitions that are acceptable to psychologists, rather than a layperson’s definition. For example, if you are asked to define “internal validity”, saying “the opposite of external validity” or “important to achieve in an experiment” or “getting true results” would not earn as