Radford PSYC 201 - Second APA paper Assignment

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PSYC 201 – Second APA paper assignment In this paper you will complete an APA-style research paper that addresses a basic question in psychology: Is there just one basic human ability (i.e., intelligence) or more than one? You are being given the data from 30 Radford undergraduates who each performed six cognitive tasks. Three of these tasks were in the area of memory and three of these tasks involved sensory-motor function. According to the theoretical work on intelligence by Charles Spearman, performance on all types of tasks is driven by a common ability or “mental energy” that he referred to as “g” (short for general intelligence) (Spearman, 1923). If Spearman is correct and there is only one “intelligence”, scores for all six of the tasks you performed should be correlated with scores on all of the other tests. If a person has a lot of g (if they have a high level of general intelligence) they should perform well on all tasks that require intelligence. In the last 20 years a number of alternatives to Spearman’s views on intelligence have emerged. For example, Robert Sternberg states that we do not possess one type, or source, of intelligence, but three. He refers to these as academic problem-solving, practical intelligence, and creative intelligence (Sternberg & Wagner, 1993). According to this view, high scores on measures of one type of intelligence are not necessarily associated with high scores on measures of either of the other two types of intelligence. A second alternative view of intelligence has been provided by Howard Gardner (Gardner, 1983). In his work, he proposes that there are seven different human intelligences and that an individual may be gifted or not in any of these seven areas. According to this view, high scores on measures of musical intelligence should be correlated with other measures of musical intelligence, but not with measures of other types of intelligence. The data we collected in the lab can provide information about which of the two views of intelligence is best supported by the data. Spearman would predict that scores for every measure should be correlated with scores for every other measure. Sternberg and Gardner would predict that (a) measures of memory will be correlated with other measures, (b) measures of sensory-motor function will be correlated with other measures of sensory-motor function, and that (c) measures of memory will not be correlated with measures of sensory-motor function. The purpose of this paper is to use the pattern of correlations among the six tests of cognitive function to determine which of the two basic views of intelligence is better supported by the data. In the assignment, we have provided several pieces of text to be included in your APA-style paper and have prompted you for other specific pieces of information to include in the full paper. The final draft of the paper is due on Wednesday of the last week of classes. Five points will be deducted for every day the paper is late. Your paper should include all sections of an APA-style research paper: title page, abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, references, at least one table, and at least one figure.Title Page: Generate your own title for the paper. Generate your own title page. Abstract: You provide the abstract. Make sure you look at the first chapter of the APA Style Manual to see what type of information go into the abstract. Write the abstract after you’ve written the rest of the paper. Introduction: The first page of this handout provides an informal description of the theoretical background for the study and the specific question that the data for this study can address. You are responsible for writing your own introduction, in your own words. However, you may feel free to paraphrase any of the information from the first page of this handout. You should also read the section of a chapter by Myers that has been placed on Reserve in the library (and is available electronically). It is a chapter on intelligence from a well-known introductory psychology text. Basically, the more work that it looks like you did on the introduction, the better the grade you will receive. Be careful to avoid plagiarizing another author’s work. If you have a question about whether you are plagiarizing or not, or if you need to cite another author or not, please ask either Dr. Pierce or Lisa for advice. It is surprisingly easy to detect plagiarism. The purpose of your introduction is to provide enough background information so that the reader has a clear idea of the research question that the data address and of what your paper can potentially contribute to the field. The introduction provides a description of work that people have done in the past and an argument for why your data provide address an important question. At some point towards the end of your introduction you should state the goal of the study and describe how your data will allow you to meet this goal. Method: Participants. You write the participants section. Be sure to include (a) the mean and standard deviation for the age of the participants, (b) the number of males and females, and (c) the number of left and right handed participants. The participants were recruited from two sections of PSYC 201 Psychological Research I in the spring 2001 semester. Materials. We have included the following descriptions of each of the six tests. Tests of cognitive function Digit-Span test. In this task subjects were read lists of digits and asked to repeat these lists back. On each trial the subject was read a list of digits ranging from one through nine. As soon as the list was read the subject was asked to repeat as many digits back as they could. The first list contained four digits. If the subject provided the name of a digit that was not on the list or failed to provide the name of a digit that was on the list, the subject performed a second trial with four digits. If the subject correctly provided all four digits the subject was read a list with five digits. The same procedure was repeateduntil the subject incorrectly named the digits on two consecutive trials. The score on this measure is the largest number of digits correctly recalled. Free recall task. In this task the experimenter read a list of fifteen words to each subject. After the experimenter finished reading the list the subject was asked to provide as


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