: Final Report Guidelines & Grading Rubric
Individual Research Report: Final Report Guidelines & Grading Rubric
You will independently write an APA-Style research report of your Team Research Project that is 7 double-spaced pages of main text, with 1-inch margins, in Times New Roman font.
Page count: The main text includes your introduction, method, results, and discussion sections. The following sections do not count toward your page limit: abstract, title page, references, tables, figures, appendix. You will not directly lose points for going past 7 pages of main text, but the Teaching Team will not read past 7 double-spaced pages of main text. Concise writing Concision is key!
References: You should have at least 6 key references that are published articles from peer-reviewed psychology journals (your textbook does not count). You will need references for the following components of your project (you can cite each reference once, or multiple times, for one or more of these components): • Your focal theory (i.e., the theory forming the basis for your main research question
and hypotheses) • Your focal psychological construct that your new measure is assessing • The published measure that you administer • Tests of the theory that your experiment is also testing • If you are replicating a previous experiment (or one portion of a previous
experiment), one of your references must be to the original study you are replicating
The section of your Morling textbook titled Presenting Results: APA-Style Reports and Conference Posters (p. 505-543) provides all the information you need for knowing how to write this Individual Research Report. The Teaching Team will use the checklists provided in this section of your textbook as a grading rubric for each component of your report (see rubric below for page numbers). The example report in this section of your textbook is a great example of how to implement APA-Style (p. 525-539).
The grading rubric below provides the points allotted to each component of your Individual Research Report, along with overall writing quality & finesse (i.e., writing flair and creativity – be creative & draw your reader in!). When necessary, it also includes additional checklist items that are tailored specifically for this assignment. The Teaching Team will add these additional checklist items to its grading rubric.
Note: Italicized terms in the following rubric are defined in your Morling textbook.
Final Report Grading Criteria & Rubric (100 points total)
• Title (2 points) o See checklist on p. 507
• Abstract (3 points)
o See checklist on p. 507
• Introduction (25 points) o See checklist on p. 510 o Provide a brief overview of your focal psychological theory. o Define your focal psychological construct. o Include at least one hypothesis about the causal relationship you expect to
find, between your conceptual independent variable and your conceptual dependent variable (note that your conceptual dependent variable will be your focal psychological construct). 
Be sure that this hypothesis follows logically from your focal
psychological theory. At some point in your introduction, you should explain how this hypothesis derives from your focal psychological theory.
Briefly explain how you will test this hypothesis. o Explain that one additional goal of the present research is to explore the
internal reliability and convergent validity (one type of construct validity) of your new measure. Also explain how you will assess its reliability and validity.
• Method (15 points) o See checklist on p. 512 o Participants
Include at least age, race/ethnicity, and gender information about your participants. You may include additional demographic factors if you would like and have space.
o Design and procedure What did people do as participants in your study?
• Tip: Think about your participants’ perspective of your study, and describe each major thing they did, from being recruited into your study to completing the consent form, to providing their demographic information.
• Tip: Do not describe the detailed specifics of your materials in this section. You will do that in the materials section.
What were the conditions of your experiment? How did you manipulate your independent variable (i.e., what was your operational independent variable)? What were the levels of your independent variable?
How many participants were in each condition? o Materials
Refer to an appendix presenting the full set of all materials you used for conducting your study.
Stimuli • Describe any stimuli (e.g., pictures, vignettes, news articles)
that you presented to your participants, as a part of your experimental manipulation.
Measures
• Describe the measures in your survey, each with its own paragraph.
o Describe items. o Describe response scale(s). o Describe how scale items were aggregated. o Report reliability for the published measure, the final
set of items in your new measure, and any other multi-item measures you included in your study.
• You do not need to describe your demographic items in this section.
• Results (15 points) o See checklist on p. 514 o Your New Measure: Reliability and Validity
Report the internal reliability of all items in your new measure, and, if initial reliability is low, report the reliability of your final set of items excluding any individual items that were pulling down the overall reliability initially.
• Refer to an APA-Style table providing: o The wording of each item in your new measure. o The mean and standard deviation of each individual item. o The reliability of your scale, if each individual item were
to be deleted from your scale. Report the convergent validity of your new measure.
o Experimental Effect(s) State the kind of analysis you used to test your experimental
hypothesis or hypotheses (you will be conducting at least one independent samples t-test).
Report the means of your dependent variable(s), in each experimental condition.
• Refer to an APA-Style figure (a bar graph) representing these means.
Report the results of your hypothesis test(s).
• Discussion (20 points) o See checklist on p. 516 o When evaluating construct validity, be sure to answer the following questions:
Did you find evidence that your new measure successfully assessed your focal psychological construct?
How might your new measure be improved? o When describing potential future research, be sure to answer the following
questions (in addition to other ideas you might have): How might your measure be used in future research? How might future work expand on your experiment?
o Be creative! The discussion is your space to speculate about your findings and what you think they mean, both for the larger context of published work you reviewed in your introduction and in applied contexts.
• References (5 points) o See checklist on p. 524 o Include at least 6 key references.
• Table(s) o Points for tables assigned in results section. o Each member of your Research Team can use the same table(s) that you
created together when analyzing data.
• Figure(s) o Points for figures assigned in results section. o Each member of your Research Team can use the same figure(s) that you
created together when analyzing data.
• Appendix o Points for appendix assigned in method section o Each member of your Research Team can use the same Appendix(es) that
you created together when programming your study in Qualtrics.
• Writing Quality & Finesse (15 points) o Overall quality, creativity, and clarity of your writing and analysis. o Extent to which you followed the technical elements of APA-Style not
referenced above. (See bulleted list p. 516-517). o Extent to which you implemented the 5 writing style suggestions (p. 517-519):
first person, sentence structure, active voice, strong verbs, concision. o Use of appropriate paraphrasing (p. 520-522). o Proper in-text citations (p. 522-523). o Spelling, punctuation, and grammar also count.
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