1-page evaluation that will consist of two parts: Part I: Summary IN YOUR OWN WORDS, explain what the paper was about. What was the research question? What hypotheses did the authors test? How did they test their hypothesis, that is, what methods did use? What were the results, that is, what did the patterns of data show? What do the authors think their results mean? Part II: Evaluation Consider the questions in the Reading Research Articles ” Evaluating an Empirical Article.” Pick one or two questions or observations that seem most relevant to your interpretation of this paper and respond to them. Try to justify your responses in terms of what you know and have learned rather than only opinion or anecdote (though these are not necessarily wrong or invalid). This portion should be longer than 2 sentences! Evaluating an Empirical Article: Here are some questions you should ask yourself as you read: 1) Did the authors convince you that their research question is important? 2) Does the design of their experiment fit logically with the hypothesis they want to test? What prediction does their hypothesis make about how their results come out? Does their prediction make sense? 3) Does the dependent measure they used make sense? 4) Did they control for everything they needed to control for to plausibly make their case? Can you think of other important controls they should have run? 5) If you were doing the experiment, are there things you would do differently? Why? 6) Did the authors interpretation make sense? 7) Can you think of alternative explanations for their findings? That is, does success in their task necessarily indicate what they think it indicates? Are there other reasons babies might have performed in the same way? 8) What do you think about the conclusions the authors draw? Are there additional experiments that you think would be relevant and interesting for future investigations? Things to Avoid: Avoid very generic critiques, that is, critiques that could be applied to almost any paper. For example, saying that they should have run more subjects is usually not a valid critique. Saying that their sample should have been more diverse may be a valid critique, but only if you have a clear, plausible reason for thinking that children from a different background would perform differently. Similarly, avoid suggesting future studies that are very generic, like testing a wider range of ages or children from a different population. These may be good suggestions, but only if you have a clear, plausible reason to think that children from a different population would perform differently. Things to Do: Strike a balance between recognizing that no study is perfect and recognizing that studies published in professional, peer-reviewed journals are usually pretty good. That is, they probably dont suffer from obvious, glaring mistakes, but they probably dont address every single alternative explanation or confound either. Remember that NO experiment proves anything. An experiment might support or cast doubt on a hypothesis and the theory from which it originates, but no experiment can reveal THE TRUTH about any topic.
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