What follows are excerpts from fictitious manuscripts.  Each passage has at least three things wrong with it.  Read through these carefully and in five minutes we will go over them as a class.

Introduction

 ...this phenomena has been demonstrated by several researchers, but most memorably by Schwarz & Happy, 1991.  In that study, the experimenters gave participants 5 different word pairs to memorize and then split them up into three groups to be tested...

 ...but this finding is worthless because the researchers did not use a control condition.  Furthermore, a more appropriate paradigm would have made use of the autokinetic effect.  Why, you might ask?  Because Sherif (1954) and other researchers have demonstrated its usefulness for eliciting conformity in participants...

 ...which led me to believe that a study using female participants would produce different results.  In the present study, participants were randomly assigned to either the high dissonance or low dissonance conditions.  The effects of this manipulation were then measured in order to prove the hypothesis...

Method

 ...79 undergraduate students were recruited through an ad in a campus newspaper that is published every other day.  Participants then receive a written questionnaire and are given 15 minutes to complete it.  The only instructions they were given were to "answer each question in the order that it appears".  After 15 minutes...

Results

 ...a t-test that I ran on SPSS revealed that participants in the unattractive partner condition (M = 3.42) scored higher than participants in the attractive partner condition (M = 2.98).  The results of this t-test were t (64) = 4.32, p < .05, which is a higher t-value than the t-test for response times of t (64) = 3.87, p < .05, but lower than the first t-test of t (64) = 4.99, p < .01.  One reason why our hypothesis was not supported is that...

Discussion

 ...this correlation indicates that watching violent TV does indeed lead to increased violence on the playground.  Furthermore, it suggests that kids aren't to blame when it comes to school violence, but rather unattentive parents are.  This conclusion stands in stark contrast to those of Power and Ranger (School violence as a predictor of eventual job success, 1998, p. 112), and contradicts other researchers' arguments that...
 
 

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