Fear.
You will think about what topic you would like to write about – you can go through your textbook, think about any topic that is personally interesting to you because of your personal experiences or the people around you, or maybe base it off your favorite novel or movie. You will then find an empirical study to summarize and compare with what you have been learning in this course through the videos and textbooks. So your research paper due in Week 5 will need to be at minimum three pages long and consist of a summary of the empirical study you found as well as a discussion of how this paper connects with information you are learning about in the course. The goal of assignment one is to get you to start thinking about the first part of your project and used to finding scholarly articles for your research. A scholarly journal article is an academic peer-reviewed article that usually describes a research project/experiment. It may seem challenging at first to read such articles, but, by learning how to do so, you will be a better consumer of accurate information. While many general interest articles are based on academic research, they are journalists’ interpretations and compilations of mostly sensational information. Therefore, it’s usually best for academic and science writing to learn how to go straight to the source of the research to really understand if the information you are reading about is accurate. Psychology is a science. Many psychologists are interested in doing research. The research is then shared with the larger scientific community in scholarly journals after being vetted by experts in the field. To give you a brief idea of research, you are required to find and read one empirical study in a scholarly journal. Empirical study means that this is an article where the authors write about a study they actually performed (not only about theoretical issues or a compilation or studies other people have done called theoretical papers or literature reviews). Directions (from Semester Projects: Descriptions) For this project, you will write a 3-page minimum paper.