The purpose of this assignment is to 1) give you experience in reading primary empirical literature from the field of psychology, 2) allow you to learn more in-depth information about a specific topic from the course and demonstrate that learning and 3) practice/improve professional writing skills.
Article Review
You can choose from one of three articles on operant conditioning that have been posted for you (attached below).
Journals
The articles you choose must come from an APA or affiliated professionally refereed journal (https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/index) (peer-reviewed). Articles from magazines are not acceptable. Articles should be a minimum of 5 full pages of text, without the references. Short reports, book reviews, and articles 1-2 pages in length are not acceptable.
Writing the Review
The review should be at least 5 pages and should include a summary of the article. The summary should be divided into four sections:
Introduction (introducing the topic of the article and the purpose of the article)
In this section you will introduce the topic of the article and give some background, and explain the hypothesis of the article being reviewed.
Discussion (summarizing the author’s main points)
You will start with reviewing the findings from previous studies that were cited. Also in this section, you want to explain what the author(s) in the article did to conduct their study, what their results are, what their findings are and the major points from the discussion.
Analysis of Classical Conditioning
You will include a section of the paper that will critically analyze how the authors operationalize classical conditioning in this article. What is the main stimulus-response relationship that they are analyzing? What are the NS, UCS, UCR, CS, CR? What is the dependent variable(s) and the independent variable(s)? What are the other factors discussed (e.g. Acquisition? Extinction? Variations in contiguity? Higher order Conditioning? Spontaneous Recovery?) Be specific.
This requires detail and specifics. Make sure to define the major terms of the theory and explain how those are operationalized in this study. Do the results support what you have learned about the theory?
Conclusion (reviewing the article’s conclusions and what you learned from the article).
What were the conclusions of the author(s)?
You will evaluate the article. What do you think about the research and their conclusions? Make sure to support your opinion. Your comments should be substantive.
The review should be written in APA format, and include a reference page (do not include an abstract in your article review).
