Article Review Assignment

Psychology 110 Fall 2005

Overview: This is an assignment that will replace your lowest quiz grade. It is entirely
optional. You will read an empirical article from the journal Psychological Science, and
write a one to two page (double spaced) summary of the article.

Step 1: Find an article.

So that people dont all write summaries of the same few articles, I have randomly
assigned everyone in the class a year between 1990 and 2000. You need to find an article
from the journal Psychological Science from that year. There are two ways you can do
this. First, you can go to the library and find the bound hardcopies of the journal. From
there you can flip through the articles and find one that interests you. Alternately, you
can go online to PsychInfo (which will be demonstrated in class) and search for articles
from that particular year. If you search online, please note that there are several journals
with similar names. Your assignment is to find an article from Psychological Science,
which is different from Psychological Science (China) and Current Directions in
Psychological Science. Neither of these are appropriate.
Also note that the article you review must be an empirical article. This means it
must report the results of a study. Opinion pieces or review articles (articles that
summarize empirical articles) are not appropriate. If you are unsure, a good way to tell if
an article is an empirical one is whether or not it has a methods section. If you are
unsure, bring me a copy of the article and I can tell you whether its appropriate or not.

Step 2: Write the summary

In your review, you should summarize the following information in the original
article: the basic background information necessary to understand the article, the
hypotheses that the article tested, the methods used to test the hypothesis, the results of
the study, and the conclusions that were drawn. This should not take you more than two
double spaced pages. You probably can not do a complete job in less than a single
double-spaced page.
Note: Articles come with an abstract, which is a brief summary of the article. Do
not use the abstract in any way to write your summary.

Step 3: Turn in the summary

The due date for the summary is the beginning of our final class session (12/15).
Given that this is an extra credit assignment, late papers will not be accepted.
In order to be accepted, papers must be typed, double spaced. They must be a
review of an article from the year which you were assigned, and they must be turned in
with a copy of the abstract of the article that you reviewed.
 Name Assigned Year
Barnicle, Erin 1992
Bialik, Jenna Mackenzie 1990
Caldwell, Mallory Faye 1998
Coonfield, Laura Elizabeth 1995
Coss, Brittany Victoria 1994
Crabill, Thomas Voss 1990
Dansie, Jennifer Alta 2000
Drover, Christopher John 1991
Frizzo, Matthew Louis 2000
Green, Michael James 1999
Grinberg, Annette Shoshana 1997
Gulish, Brittany Rose 1992
Helal, Yaser Hamdy 1994
Hinshaw, Sierra Lynn 1993
Huston, Kayla Jeanette 1999
Ingram, Eric Kenneth 1993
Ito, Takashi Brian 1997
Keane, John Alexander 1995
Kenny, William Tappan 1996
Lewis, Anthony Wayne 1996
MacNair, Julia Skinner 1991
McDowell, Naomi Elizabeth 1999
Mehl, Molly Elizabeth 1997
Misener, Robert Andrew 1993
Peter, Kathryn Louise 1998
Pierce, Sarah Elizabeth 2000
Schultz, Jamie Kay 1991
Shepler, Katie Elizabeth 1995
Skaggs, Justin Randall 1990
Smith, Jonathan Garcia 1992
Solomon, Marialicia Tricia 1994
Warren, Meghan Hetrick 1998
Zechiel, Amanda Rae 1996