Instructions: Please address the following discussion questions and pay attention to the assignment instructions:
The goal of this discussion board assignment is to stimulate and encourage critical thinking. Please complete the following tasks and post a comment to the discussion board by the assignment deadline:
Select a major topic from the current or any of the previous modules: Module 0 – 7.
Based on the topic you selected, please conduct background research. Students are encouraged to use the databases that are available on the library’s main website (e.g., PubMed, PsycArticles).
The main objective of this assignment is to identify a minimum of one research article and critically evaluate the type of information reported by the author(s) of the article(s). Although not required, students are encouraged to identify more than one article.
At least one of the articles has to be a research report from a peer-reviewed journal. That is, research reports provide information about the results of one or more experiments. The second article can be a review article, which also has to be from a peer-reviewed journal. Students are allowed to use other sources of information if deemed necessary (e.g., newspaper article, blog post). However, the main article that you discuss is required to be a research report from a peer-reviewed journal.
Please submit a post to the discussion forum that summarizes the results of your background research, and please structure your assignment as follows:
Describe your search strategy, and please be specific. What databases did you use? How many “hits” did your search generate? That is, how many articles were you able to identify via the database search? What search terms did you use?
Summarize the article(s) that you selected. What type of information was provided by the authors? Describe each paper’s hypothesis, research questions, research techniques/methods, results, and conclusions.
Critically evaluate the articles you selected. Did the authors provide enough information to support the hypothesis and/or thesis of their paper? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the paper?
Describe how the information provided by the authors will inform your intellectular development. How can you use this information in your future career as a person who is interested in psychology or a related field?
Style and format: the only requirements regarding style and format are that your in-text citations have to be in APA format. In addition, you should include a references section at the end of your post and it has to be in APA format. Students are free to format the rest of the post as they please. However, be sure that the document is generally structured in an organized and clear manner, consistent with the criteria in the grading rubric (see below)
Please remember that you are expected to contribute a new entry to the discussion forum, as instructed in bullet point 5 (see above).
