Experimental Reports in Psychology
Report-writing conventions Experimental reports reflect the process of conducting an experiment in the following format; Follow this and get more info from this for the report.
Title (2 marks) – offers readers an idea of what the experiment is about
Abstract (10 marks) – a very brief summary of the whole report. The word limit for the Abstract in this assignment is no more than 100 words (no allowance of 10% beyond the word limit). Although the Abstract appears at the beginning of the report (i.e., just after the title) it is the last thing to write up because it summarises the entire report in a nutshell. This section enables readers to gain a good idea of what the report is about and enables them to decide whether or not they will read the rest of the report. It includes the aim of the study and information relating to the experimental design, the experimental hypothesis, the results, and ends with a concluding statement about the implications of the results.
Introduction (6 marks) – provides readers with theoretical and empirical information about the research area concerned, the experimental rationale, and the experimental hypotheses.
Methods – describes how the experiment was conducted. This section is subdivided into the following four sections:
Design (3 marks) – states the experimental design (within-participants or between participants design), the independent variable (IV), and dependent variable (DV)
Participants (2 marks) – states relevant information about the participants, e.g., how many there were, age range or mean age, and where relevant, gender breakdown, occupation, how they were recruited… Note: For this assignment, enter your participant information in the Excel file “3. Participant Info” (available in Canvas). You should then report the total number of participants and the average age (you can also work out the age range) of the participants.
Materials/Apparatus (2 marks) – describes the stimuli, response sheets, and any apparatus used in the experiment
Procedure (5 marks) – describes how the experiment was conducted so that anyone wanting to replicate your experiment can do so based on the information provided here
Results (18 marks) – presents the (1) descriptive statistics (e.g., table of means as shown below in Table 1) with a brief description of the summary data. Here is an example: Table 1: Mean % accurate recall on memory task Mean (% recall) Omega-3 fish oil 87 No omega-3 fish oil 75 And (2) inferential statistics which states the statistical test used to analyse the data (e.g., t-test), presents the statistical results in APA format, e.g., t(8) = 2.11, p = .05 (note that ‘8’ indicated here is the ‘df’ or degrees of freedom), and whether the statistical results support the experimental hypothesis or not (i.e., the experimental hypothesis is accepted or rejected, and the null hypothesis is rejected or failed to be rejected).
Discussion (30 marks) – starts off with a description of the results and states what conclusions can be drawn from these results. Discuss the results in relation to previous research findings mentioned in the Introduction section. Any limitations of the experiment can also be discussed and suggestions for future research can be proposed. References (5 marks) – apply the APA style of formatting references by presenting the full reference of all the citations (e.g., books, journals…) that were cited in your experimental report. Refer to the PSY Referencing Guide
