Guided Research Review Assignment

Guided Research Review Assignment

Research Article Review Assignment
This assignment will help students learn how to find, cite, analyze, and summarize a scholarly research article. For each step of the assignment, type your responses directly into next to the questions. To help you not miss any part, the places where a response is required are printed in green.
Notes for each part indicate where to find more information in the seventh edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association or on the APA Style website.
Step 1: Finding a Research Article
The best place to find a reliable research article is in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal accessed from a research database or platform, such as APA PsycNet, ProQuest, OvidSP, or EBSCOhost. Please see the UTD library resources for access to journal databases. APA journals are a good starting point for students of psychology.
Many types of research articles are published in scholarly journals, including quantitative studies, qualitative studies, and mixed methods studies. In general, research articles have the following characteristics:
• report original, or primary, research
• include distinct sections that reflect the stages of the research process, usually the following sections in the following :

o Introduction: description of the purpose of the investigation and the issues being reported, review of the background literature, and study objectives and/or hypotheses
o Method: full description of each step of the study, including the materials used, procedures followed, research design, and flow of participants
o Results (quantitative article): report of the results of statistical analyses conducted
o Findings (qualitative article): report of the findings using natural language
o Discussion: summary of the study, including any interpretation, limitations, and implications of the results or findings and next steps

Chapters 1 and 3 of the Publication Manual provide descriptions of research articles and the sections often included in them, respectively.
To complete this assignment, select one peer-reviewed journal article on a psychological topic that genuinely interests you (published in the last 3 years). Read the article carefully and complete steps 2-4 of this assignment. For questions about the study design and results, if your article has more than one experiment, answer the questions for each experiment (label each answer by number of experiment).

Step 2: Citing a Research Article
Once you have identified a research article on a topic of interest to you, create its reference list entry and in-text citation. The reference list entry allows readers to identify and retrieve the work, and the in-text citation serves as a simple and consistent way to refer to the article during the research and writing process.
Reference List Entry
To create a reference list entry, gather the following information:
1. Author(s):
2. Year of publication:
3. Title of article:
4. Journal name:
5. Volume number:
6. Issue number (if available):
7. Page range or article number:
8. DOI:
Now, use the information to create a reference list entry according to the journal article reference examples.
Reference list entry:
In-Text Citation
Use the author and year information from your reference list entry to create the in-text citations.
Parenthetical in-text citation:
Narrative in-text citation:
Step 3: Analyzing a Research Article
Research articles are typically dense with information. The following questions will provide an organized way for you to break down the parts of the research article and understand its purpose, methods, findings, and implications.
Introduction
1. What is the topic of the article?
2. What is the hypothesis of the study?
3. What type of research study is it (e.g., quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods)?
Method
4. How many participants were in the study?
5. Who were the participants in the study? Describe from where they were recruited, any defining characteristics, etc.
6. Where was the study conducted (e.g., in a lab, at a university, in participants’ homes)?
7. What measures were used in the study?
8. What analyses were conducted in the study (e.g., correlation analysis, analysis of variance, thematic analysis)?
Results or findings
9. What are the main results or findings from the study? (Summarize in your own words)
10. If there are tables or figures in the paper, what type(s) of tables and/or figures are they? What important information do they convey?
Discussion
11. What are the main conclusions of the research?
12. To whom do the results or findings apply? Can they be generalized to all people in all places, to certain subsets of people, or something else?
13. What are the limitations of the study?
14. What remains to be investigated about this topic?
Step 4: Paraphrasing a Research Article
Now that you have analyzed its content, paraphrase important information from the research article in your own words. Keep each paraphrase to one sentence if possible. For example, you could summarize the methodology (how the research was conducted) or participants in the study, a key result or finding, or the applications or importance of the research. Use these paraphrased summaries when writing your own papers (e.g., literature reviews or response papers) to describe existing research. For each paraphrase, include either the parenthetical in-text citation or the narrative in-text citation to the research article (as shown in Step 2).
Method section paraphrase:

Results or Findings section paraphrase:

Discussion section paraphrase: