The relationship between students’ attitudes about psychology and their misconceptions about psychology.
The experiments were run in the tutorials of Week 2, Semester 1, 2015. A total of 465 people participated, consisting of first year psychology students from PSYC1040. In order to make the analysis more manageable, we reduced the number in our sample to 100. Participation in the experiment was voluntary but students were encouraged to participate to better prepare for writing their research report.
Data organization, exploration and description
The organization and exploration of data is a very important step towards the summary, description and presentation of the data in the Results section of a report. Using your own words and figures, most of what follows is the kind of information that you can include in the Appendix of your report, BUT NOT the Results section. At the minimum, the Appendix must include the raw data, exploration and screening of the data used in your analyses by way of frequency histograms and bivariate scatterplots, descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation). You must also provide the full-workings of your statistical analyses (correlations and shared variance).
By way of example, let’s take a look at a frequency histogram summarizing the true/false test scores of the class. See Figure 1.
Score on test
Figure 1. Frequency histogram of psychology misconceptions test scores from PSYC1040 prior to selecting the 100 scores for the report. An ideal normal distribution has been superimposed on the histogram for comparison.
