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PSYC02 Research Review Project – Overall Assignment Guidelines & Framework
IMPORTANT NOTE: If you are not planning to read the entirety of this lengthy document, it is essential
that you review the specific guidelines for the products you will need to produce (sections B & C). Failing
to do so will absolutely cost you marks and lead to frustration down the line.
Objective: This project will help you develop and practice core skills of effective scientific
communication. It is a scaled-down version of systematic literature review—a widely applicable and
valuable academic approach—that gives rise to two very common scientific products: a short
presentation (modelled after those given at academic conferences), and a term paper (modelled after a
scholarly research manuscript).
Description: Across the semester, you will investigate focused research question of your own design
that provides suitable foundation for a literature review. You will develop hypotheses, characterize your
primary evidence base, and summarize this literature with an emphasis on highlighting general trends
and key considerations. You will discuss your conclusions in the context of the academic literature and in
terms of relevance to the general public. This project provides the foundation for a variety of
ief,
intermediate tasks as well as two main products: your Slideshow Presentation and your Term Paper. You
will also have an opportunity to interact with and provide feedback to some of your classmates as they
work on their own projects.
Connection to Learning Outcomes & Skills: This project directly connects to all learning outcomes for
PSYC02. This assignment also focuses on the four F’s of scientific communication described early in the
term (framing, format, foundation, and fidelity). You will be evaluated on your ability to construct a clear
and effective message that is adapted to the audience and assignment guidelines, supported by and
connected to the
oader scientific literature, and presented in an honest, direct and ethical fashion.
Due Dates: The Research Review project is a semester-long exercise with multiple intermediate tasks.
These milestones are in place to support your learning, including helping you develop of a suitable
esearch question and troubleshoot any issues that may rise. The two primary products of this project
are described in the sections listed below.
You must adhere to APA guidelines and UTSC’s Code of Behaviour on Academic Matters with respect to
the appropriate use of citations. In PSYC02, we have spent a great deal of time discussing and
highlighting a) why this is important from the scientific perspective, and b) how to identify the most
appropriate source to cite. Failure to do so may be considered a violation of Academic Integrity.
This document is divided into three sections:
(A) outline of the overall process of the research review project
(B) specific requirements for your presentation, including formatting slides & your commentary
(C) specific requirements for your term pape
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(A) Process Overview & Key Milestones of Research Review
You are ultimately being evaluated on the products of your work. However, the process and steps that
underlie successful execution of all elements of this project are equally important and ultimately feature
into the information you present.
This section outlines a rough sequence of steps required to complete all elements of the research review
project. It may not effectively convey the amount of time required to complete each step, because this
can vary substantially depending on a number of factors. As a
oad suggestion, keep in mind that it
takes time to read papers carefully. Constructing your poster can easily require several hours of work to
complete.
Bear in mind that you will need to meet specific requirements of both of the major products listed later
in this document, so you should review these regularly to ensure you are keeping pace with the
equirements. As a practical matter, most students focus on completing the overall project and almost
inevitably prioritize their poster presentation as this is due earlier and on a more rigid timescale than the
individual term paper.
I. Develop a Broad Research Question
You will develop and investigate a question relevant to the intersection of technology/entertainment
and human experiences/abilities. You will select a set of topic areas (e.g., social media and
growth/development) to provide some structure to this aim. Your initial task is to develop a preliminary
guiding question that you can use to begin to explore the academic literature.
You will have considerable flexibility in defining this question, as long as you remain aligned with your
topic areas as well as connected to concepts and paradigms from psychology or very closely related
disciplines (e.g., neuroscience). You may find it helpful to
ainstorm some ideas, focusing on
parameters of research questions and study designs described in course materials, or to look for
inspiration in popular press articles on related subjects. You should be able to describe the relevance of
your question to the general public, and also consider how it is represented in non-scientific popular
press (i.e., what might a non-expert exposed to non-academic sources believe about your question?), as
you will need at least supporting non-academic source later in the project.
II. Become Familiar with the Related Literature
With a provisional question in mind, you will move to searching the academic literature. This process
will involve provisional review of scholarly articles, with an emphasis on peer-reviewed empirical papers.
The goal of this process is to gain a better understanding of the sorts of articles that exist in the
literature that might be relevant to answering your question. You may wish to use different tools at
different stages, with less formal search strategies during idea generation (e.g., Google Scholar),
followed up by more rigorous approaches. Your project will ultimately come to resemble a small-scale
systematic literature review, where a guiding question helps define a specific set of characteristics used
to identify a focused collection of empirical studies that are relevant to answering said question.
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It is quite likely that this process will require multiple attempts. You may wish to change or refine your
question and/or your search strategy as you go. Some research questions will be too na
ow or too
oad. Some will yield too many studies to fit with the goals of this project; others too few. You may set
out to investigate one idea, and encounter a review of another subject area that you find more
compelling as way to answer your question. You will submit a few small check-in tasks during this time
and the PSYC02 team will help provide feedback to ensure you are making progress and seemingly
moving in the right direction. Ultimately, as you work toward refining what you will focus on for the
project, you will begin to refine search terms and identify key features of articles you wish to include.
There are three important ideas to keep in mind during this stage of your project. First, you will want to
attend to the specific requirements of both products of your review (i.e., presentation and term paper).
Make sure that any question and literature area you focus on can complete all of these requirements.
Second, take note of citations that provide key context for your audience – for instance, if your question
elates to expressions of anger, you may need to cite a primary source for any anger measure you
describe. Finally, to the extent that your work is influenced by another systematic or focused review,
you must acknowledge this when describing your process and ensure that you are making a unique
intellectual contribution. There should be no confusion between your project and an existing source.
III. Define Key Features of your Primary Evidence Base
You will work to refine your initial question into a focused research question and develop preliminary
hypotheses and expectations. You should be able to justify how you developed these hypotheses,
providing support from specific sources you have encountered in your review. A relevant theory or
framework for approaching your question in the literature can be very helpful here.
It can sometimes be difficult to determine when you have settled on a “final” research question.
Typically, this coincides with being able to identify the key characteristics of studies that will constitute
your primary evidence base. By analogy to meta-analyses, these are the inclusion and exclusion criteria
applied to a comprehensive literature search process to refine the scope and scale of the review. Once
you have characterized your primary evidence base, conduct a final, comprehensive literature search.
It is likely that your inclusion and exclusion criteria will be based in part on what you initially have in
mind, and in part on what you discover as you begin to read in the literature. You should be able to
defend your decisions with evidence or strong arguments. Often, teams will find a few studies early on
that help clarify key features of the primary evidence base. Distinguishing features vary but might
include: study design features (e.g., experimental vs. co
elational), methodological features (e.g.,
specific definition of outcome of interest), characteristics of the population (e.g., college students vs.
other groups) or characteristics of the paper (e.g., year of publication). Keep in mind the requirements
listed in the sections below. As a very general rule of thumb, the ideal number of studies to include here
is between 6-10, where 3 is too few, and 15 is almost definitely too large.
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You must concisely document the process by which you searched the literature with respect to your
final research question. This means recording the keywords you used and any other methods of refining
your final search (e.g., na
owing publication date). Note any particularly influential studies (e.g.,
eviews that helped refine your ideas) and sources you found by means other than your search.
IV. Identify Core Articles & Extract Information
At this stage, you can identify studies that constitute your primary evidence base. You will need to
eview these articles carefully to determine if they remain similar enough to constitute a cohesive
group, and to ensure you have not overlooked any disqualifying features. Keep in mind that decisions
about inclusion and exclusion should be independent of findings; do not exclude studies just because
they do not