Preface

To students

How to use this book

To tutors

Part 1 Writing experimental reports

1 Some preliminaries

1.1 Experienced students, inexperienced students and thereport

1.2 Writing the repor

1.3 The importance of referencing in the text

1.4 The report as a research instrument

1.5 Finding things to write about: how to get more references

1.6 Experimental ethics

2 The INTRODUCTION section

2.1 The first part of the INTRODUCTION: reviewing the background toyour study

2.2 Inexperienced students, experienced students and theINTRODUCTION

2.3 Your own study

3 The METHODcsection

3.1 The DESIGN subsection

3.2 The PARTICIPANTS subsection

3.3 The APPARATUS or MATERIALS subsection

3.4 The PROCEDURE subsection

3.5 Interacting with and instructing participants

3.6 Optional additional subsections of the METHOD

4 The RESULTS section

4.1 Describing the data

4.2 Analysing the data

4.3 An example RESULTS section

4.4 Mistakes to avoid in the RESULTS section

4.5 Rejecting or not rejecting the null hypothesis

4.6 Reporting specific statistics

5 The DISCUSSION section

5.1 How well do the findings fit the predictions?

5.2 What do the findings mean?

5.3 What are the implications of these findings?

5.4 What to do when you've been unable to analyse your dataproperly5

5.5 External validity:the generalizability of findings

5.6 Some tips to help you to avoid some common failings in theDISCUSSION

5.7 Two example DISCUSSION sections

6 The TITLE and ABSTRACT

6.1 The TITLE

6.2 The ABSTRACT

7 References and appendices

7.1 The REFERENCES section

7.2 General rules for the REFERENCES section

7.3 Citing specific types of reference

7.4 Citing electronic and online sources

7.5 Appendices

8 Producing the final version of the report

Part 2 Designing experiments

9 Experimenting in psychology

10 Experimental design I

11 Statistics:significance testing

12 Statistics:effect size and power

13 Experimental design II

Commentary

Recommended reading

Answers to SAQs

References