Running head: VERY SHORT SUMMARY IN ALL CAPS 1

Title: Describe your take home message in 12 words or fewer.

Nate Kornell

Williams College

[Note: If youre in my class, you dont need an author note for your lab report.]

Author Note

Nate Kornell, Department of Psychology, Williams College.

Grant x from Mr. Nobody supported this research. Juliet and Violet Kornell

provided invaluable support.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Nate Kornell,

Department of Psychology, Williams College, Williamstown, MA, 01267. E-mail:

nate.kornell@williams.edu.
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Abstract

The abstract for this paper is very brief: Nate summarizes the formatting and content of

each section of a psychology paper following the guidelines of the 6th edition of the APA

Manual. The abstract should be a concise summary of your paper. In about 150 words or

less, it should cover some or all of the following elements, not necessarily in this order:

What the question/hypothesis is; why it matters; key aspects of the method; what you

found; and your conclusions/what your findings mean. Be specific (here and throughout

the paper) when possible; for example, participants learned significantly more when

they studied trivia questions under water than on land is better than participants

learning was significantly affected by where they studied.

Keywords: Up to five keywords (e.g., Learning, Memory, Bias, Heuristic)

-- Insert title (again) here --

Your introduction goes here. The big task of the introduction is to explain the

issue/problem youre addressing, and explain why it matters. In other words, explain why

the reader should care about the study you did. For this class it should probably be a

maximum of about two pages.

A big part of an effective introduction is explaining previous scholarshipthat is,

explain whatever background your reader needs to know in order to understand your

research. In describing previous scholarship, youll be citing references. The references

should be in APA format. Please refrain from including background if it is only

tangentially related to the issues in your paper.

Use an ampersand to cite a reference inside parentheses (Allen, Mahler, & Estes,

1969; Baron-Cohen, 1995) but use and if you want to cite something outside of

parentheses, such as Baker and Brown (1984).

In the course of your introduction, youll naturally want to talk about the

question(s) you asked in your research. In many (but not all) cases, you will have a

hypothesis or set of hypotheses instead of a question or set of questions. The only

difference between a question and a hypothesis you have a question and an educated

guess about the answer.

The second time you cite something with more than two authors, just use the first

authors name followed by et al. For example, here is how our three articles from above

would now be cited (Allen et al., 1969; Baker & Brown, 1984; Baron-Cohen, 1995).

When you write about your hypotheses (or, in the absence of hypotheses, your

questions), explain what they were, and also why you think they make sense. In other
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words, explain your predictions and the reasoning behind them. Your reasons will

probably be based on a mix of previous research and intuition.

At the end of the introduction (or in the first paragraph of the method), try to

summarize your method in one paragraph. Only include the key elements.

Here and throughout the paper, write as if your reader is an intelligent person who

knows basic psychology terms and basic statistics but doesn't know anything about the

research you did or the background literature.

A few miscellaneous notes: Write in the past tense (e.g., the results showed)

Work with other students (do analyses, read drafts for each other, etc.) but write your

own paper. And do not plagiarize.

Formatting notes: According to the APA manual, 6th edition, there are multiple

levels of headings within the body of the text. The highest level is bold and centered on

its own line (see below). Also, notice that there are no page breaks between introduction,

method, results, and discussion. And notice that everything is double-spaced.

Method

The first level of heading (Method, above) should be centered in bold.

The method section should describe what you did. For this class it should

probably be a maximum of about two pages. Be concrete and precise. After reading your

method, your reader should be able to replicate your study at another college or

university. Sometimes the first paragraph of the method section is a summary of the

method (in which case you obviously shouldnt include a summary at the end of the

introduction), but sometimes you go straight to the participants heading (see below).
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Participants

The second level of subheading should be left justified, bold, and its own

paragraph. There should not be a period. (Pro tip: any section with one subheading should

have a minimum of two.)

Describe your samplenumber of participants, average age, breakdown by

gender, and possibly by race and/or ethnicity. Include other pertinent info as appropriate.

Also, talk about how your sample was recruited and compensated here (or sometimes in

the procedure).

Materials

In some papers its appropriate to describe your stimuli/materials (e.g., what the

participants read, heard, looked at, etc.). When describing materials, examples always

help. As always in the method section, be concrete and precise.

Design

In some papers its appropriate to describe your design. For example, you could

say you conducted a 2x2 experiment in which you investigated the effects of treatment

(therapy versus control) and participant gender (male or female) on happiness ratings.

This section generally contains information like what your variables were, how many

levels they had, and whether they were within or between. If it isnt obvious what your

dependent variables were you can cover them here too. You probably dont need this

section for your first lab report.

Procedure

Describe what the participants did in sufficient detail that someone could

replicate the study. Go through it step by step and be clear and thorough. You dont have
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to talk about the steps the experimenter went through. You may want to include the

instructions we used, what the participants did during a given trial, the order of

presentation (if relevant), etc. You might want to have subsections in the procedure, such

as the ones that follow.

Session 1. The third level of heading is bold with a period. Its not a separate

paragraph. For example, you might talk about what happened in the first session.

Session 2. Then youd talk about session 2 (in this example). There are additional

levels of headings (fourth, etc.), but youll have to look those up if you want to use them.

Results

The most important thing to do in results is: Present data that answer the questions

and/or address the hypotheses from your intro. (Failing to address ones hypotheses is

one of the most common pitfalls in psych 201.) For this class it should probably be a

maximum of about two pages and it might be less than a single page.

Think about what your hypotheses/questions were, and what the reader needs to

know to answer them. Make sure you address them in the results section. Do this even if

you arent required to write an introduction.

Remember to talk about the findings in the results section; don't just stick a bunch

of numbers in there. On the other hand, you don't want to elaborately spell out everything

you're going to say in the discussion. Theres a balance to be struck between talking

about what the data show and going into detail about what they mean.

When you present the results of any inferential statistics (e.g., t-tests, correlations,

ANOVAs), make sure to report the relevant means and SDs. Also, always make clear the
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direction of an effect (e.g., saying two means were different isnt as good as saying one

was higher than the other). Means should always be accompanied by standard deviations.

Heres an example. Assume we did an experiment to test the prediction that

people can read concrete nouns (e.g., potato) more quickly than abstract nouns (e.g.,

liberty). Suppose we do a within-participant experiment with 12 participants and find

that people are faster on the concrete nouns than the abstract nouns, and a t-test shows

that the difference is statistically significant. We could report the result as follows: It

took participants fewer seconds to name concrete words (M = .664, SD = 109) than

abstract words (M = .689, SD = 113). This difference was significant: t(11) = 2.29, p <

.05. The APA Manual strongly suggests reporting confidence intervals or effect size but

doing so is not necessary for psych 201 lab reports.

You can also present your data using a table or graph. If you do, make sure to use

correct APA formatting (for example, the graph/table comes at the end of the paper).

Discussion

The discussion should address the issues raised in your introduction. For this class

it should probably be a maximum of about two pages. You might want to include some or

all of the following.

Summarize your findings. Were your hypotheses supported?

Talk about why you found what you found. Why were/werent your hypotheses

supported? This might involve some reiteration of the introduction, especially for

hypotheses that were supported. It might also involve some discussion of problems with

the study for hypotheses that werent supported. But talking about why can also involve

other things (e.g., maybe the hypothesis really was wrong).

Talk about implications of your study for a) the real world or b) psychological

theory. In this class, there might not be much to say about theory, but well see.

You might propose future research, although doing so is not always useful.
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References

Allen, G. A., Mahler, W. A., & Estes, W. K. (1969). Effects of recall tests on long-term

retention of paired associates. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior,

8, 463-470.

Baker, L. & Brown, A.L. (1984). Metacognitive skills and reading. In P. David Pearson

(Ed.), Handbook of reading research. New York: Longman.

Baron-Cohen, S. (1995). Mindblindness: an essay on autism and theory of mind. Boston:

MIT Press/Bradford Books.

[NOTE: Make sure you write your references in APA style. These are examples of citing

a journal article, a chapter in a book, and a book, respectively. There is a different format

for each of these and for dozens of other types of publication. The Williams College

library has a helpful set of examples of how to do APA references:

http://library.williams.edu/citing/styles/apa.php. (Theres also this thing called Google

that can be handy sometimes.) ]

Footnotes

[NOTE: If you have footnotes they go here. If not delete this page.]
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Table 1

Describe the table, for example: Mean correlations in each of the three conditions of

Experiment 1

[Put table right here.]

Note. Put a note here if necessary (with the word note italicized). For example: Mean

correlations were calculated by computing a correlation for each participant and then

averaging across participants.

[NOTE: If you have a table it goes on this page. If you have more than one, each gets its

own page. There are specific rules for formatting tables; see APA manual.]
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[Put the figure right here.]

Figure 1. Write the caption here.

[NOTE: If you have a figure it goes here. If you have more than one, each gets its own

page. There are specific rules for formatting figures; see APA manual.]