This document provides guidance for a student writing a methods section for an experiment paper. It includes reminders about including key methodological details like the mean, standard deviation, and order of events. It also notes specific details that should be included about the materials used, like the dimensions of the SMART Board and font size used for word presentations. Finally, it provides the number of participants and how to properly report the participant demographics and average age in the paper.

1. Review of Our
Experiment
Information that will help
you better shape your
sections for your final paper

2. IMPORTANT COMMENTS
ABOUT METHODS SECTION
• Remember
that the 7th word was red in
all three experimental trials
• Need to add to Methods section:
•
Mean, standard deviation
• Write
out number if beginning of sentence

3. MORE INFORMATION LEFT
OUT
• Order
sense
•
of events - Make sure they make
Talk about practice trials before experimental
trials
• Once
you’ve described the first trial, you just need
to state that they followed the same procedure,
but different words were used
•
Write in past tense in terms of what we did,
not in terms of instructions to participants
• Materials
•
Include the response sheet in materials

4. SIMPLE FORMATTING ISSUES
• Don’t
add additional spaces between
paragraphs and/or sections
• Space twice between sentences
• Don’t make one long, huge paragraph –
break it up!
• Write in past tense
• Trial vs. Trail
• Punctuation before quotations: 4’ X 7.’

5. LIST OF WORDS
• Table
of Words
You must refer to the table in your text
• APA style labeling and description
• Response sheet versus list of words: Figure
versus table
•
• Remember
to explicitly state that the
participants were instructed to recall the
words in no particular order

6. DETAILS
SMART Board (dimensions were 4’ X 7’)
• Microsoft PowerPoint 2007
• Font on projection: 32 Point Calibri Font
• Laboratory in Psychology course
•
•
Means of recruitment
Participants did not receive any incentives
• Numbers
•
•
Type out any numbers that are less than 10; 10
or more you can put in numerical form
• Unless
you are talking about number of participants

7. REMINDERS
• Make
sure you edit your graded
sections
• You will consolidate these sections to
make up your final paper
• You don’t want unnecessary point
deductions for easy fixes
• Make sure you reread your sections, as
I have made edits in () and red font

8. NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS
• There
•
were a total of 13 participants
8 Females and 5 Males
• Average
age = 22.5 years
• Standard deviation = 1.96 years
• Don’t forget to go back to your
methods section and edit this!

9. REPORTING AGE
•
Ways to write it out:
Fourteen participants (M = 22.50
females)…
1.96 years; 8
Participants consisted of 14 (Mage = 22.50, SD = 1.96
years; 8 females and 5 males) undergraduate
psychology students…
Fourteen undergraduate psychology students (5
male),with a mean age of 22.50 years (SD = 1.96
years), participated in…

10. Our Experiment
• What
•
did we do in our experiment?
What were we testing?
• What
did you expect to happen?
• You need to think about your
hypothesis before you run the analysis
•
No biased hypotheses
• After
running the analysis, think about
the results in relation to your hypothesis

11. Normal recall of words
• Our
experiment was a test of memory
skills in regards to amount of words
recalled
• When recalling a normal list of words,
what kind of graph would you expect if
you were considering word position in
relation to the amount of words
recalled?
•
By normal, I mean that all the words are
unbiased and the same size, color, etc.

12. The Von Restorff Effect
• Also
called the “isolation effect”
• Named after Dr. Hedwig Von Restorff
•
She discovered this effect after
performing a set of memory experiments
in 1933
• The
basic concept is that you have a
higher chance of remembering an
item that is isolated in a group of
similar items
•
Examples include color, highlighting, etc.

13. Recall of words with an
isolated word
• What
would you expect the graph
to look like if we were considering
word position with amount of words
recalled?

14. Understanding the Concepts
• You
will need to give a lot of thought to
the concepts
Important for Intro and Discussion Sections
• It will help you to choose the correct
papers for your Introduction section
• The articles you choose for your Intro
section should be related to the
experiment and concepts
•
• Provides
you with support for your hypothesis