Events This Week
At the Library

• Message from the Head Librarian
• Keep Your Library Card Privileges
• Library Lessons
  • Lesson 1:  Correlational Designs
  • Lesson 2:  Survey Designs
  • Lesson 3:  Section III of Your Proposal
• Circulation Desk
• Next Week at the Library

A Message from
the Head Librarian

Welcome to your eighth week at the library and welcome to the third floor of the library.  Our lessons here for the next several weeks will focus on many of the possible research designs a researcher may choose to use as the framework for his or her study.

You should now have Section II under your belt.  We have also covered the material for Section III of your Proposal and you should be working on it over the next few weeks so you can combine it with Section IV for your final rough draft to turn in.  This week we are continuing our discussion of Section IV and focusing on experimental and quasi-experimental research designs.

All seems to be well with this group. I hope to have feedback on Section II to you by this time next week. I have had several people turn Section I in again. Unless I specifically requested that you turn it in again then I will not be providing continued feedback on previous sections. As much as I would like to, I do not have the time to continuously go through sections multiple times. I try to provide as comprehensive feedback as possible on the first draft so that you can work all suggestions into your final draft. I now have Section IIs on my plate to grade and have sets of papers from my other classes to also grade. I do think that you are approaching it correctly by trying to get Section I as close to correct as possible before finalizing Section II so I don't blame you there for trying to get Section I in good shape. A few have noted that problem in the feedback forms. It would be great if we could wait until Section I was perfect before moving on to Section II but the time frame of the course does not allow us this luxury. Overall, I thought the Section I drafts were respectable. There are a lot of great research ideas coming out of the course. It would be great if some of them were actually completed because I would love to know the results.

As a general note on my feedback I want to tell you that I do not necessarily note every time you make an error within your draft. My expectation is that if I note it once then it is your responsibility to review your document to insure all cases of such errors are corrected whether it pertain to content, paragraph development, grammar, punctuation, APA style, etc. If all you do is go back through a draft and only look at what I might have highlighted or commented on then your final draft will be partly improved and likely not error free. In this same vein, if I provided a suggestion for rewording a sentence (I find myself doing this a lot when you are introducing a study) or suggest rewording or rephrasing an awkward sentence to make the meaning more straightforward or to avoid passive voice, then you need to reflect on this and then find other places where you should make this same improvement. As I have said before, I am not your proofreader. I may point out these errors but it is up to you to make sure your entire document is error free. My hope is that you will turn in a document free of technical errors so that I can focus on the content. As it is now I must focus on both to emphasize the importance of both of these aspects of writing so you are not shocked if you receive a poor grade due to some of the more technical aspects of writing. While content is of utmost importance, it is rarely achieved if accompanied by poor writing. Every technical error as well as content error in the final draft will cost you points - you can pay attention to detail now or pay later:-)

As you continue to work on Section III this week then please review my feedback on the previous sections to insure you are moving in the correct direction. So far I have had a few Section II drafts that seemed to go in a different direction than the Section I turned in. Once you turn in your final draft I would expect that all Sections flow together nicely and are all focused clearly on the same topic - I should almost be able to predict rather accurately what your research questions and purpose are going to be from simply reading Section I. I should also be able to predict what your lit review will cover from reading Section I - this has not always been the case.

As a note of warning, beginning with your Section III/IV draft I am going to start taking off for any errors still present on your title page - after several rounds of drafts with feedback I expect everyone to be able to do this accurately. If you need to review what needs to be included in Section III then look at Lesson 3 this week. This section should be relatively short but sometimes the questions and hypotheses are the most difficult things to write - be sure to read and reread relevant sections in your text for assistance/guidance with this.

e final weeks are closing in fast with still much left to accomplish.  You may want to take some time this week to review the course schedule for due dates etc. to insure you are aware of due dates, final exam dates, etc. As a final reminder, you do not or will not receive credit for any rough drafts that are not turned in on time.

APA TIDBIT

The APA tidbit selected for review this week is the reference entry for electronic media.  Some of you may have had a challenge to find a format example in the APA manual that had a good fit with the item you wanted to include in your reference list.

At a minimum, reference to an Internet source should provide a document title or description, a date, and an address.  Whenever possible, identify the authors of the document as well.  The URL is the most critical element.  If it doesn't work, readers cannot find the cited material.

The majority of documents retrieved from online publications in psychology and the behavioral sciences are exact duplicates of the print versions.  For these, use the same reference format as for a print document, but if you viewed it only in the electronic form add in brackets after the article title [Electronic version].  If you have reason to believe the electronic version has additional information or has been changed from the print version, add the date you retrieved it and the URL. 

The retrieval statement is specified and varies only for a few items: 

     Retrieved October 25, 2002, from http://jbr.org/articles.html 

Do not add a period at the end of the URL even though it ends the reference entry.  For specific directions and examples of constructing references to electronic documents, review pages 271-281 of the APA manual.

Our goals this week are to:

• Describe the different designs for explanation and prediction
• Describe key characteristics of correlational designs
• Distinguish between different types of measures of association and methods of calculating them
• Describe advanced statistical procedures for correlational designs
• Describe the process of conducting correlational study.
• Identify types of survey designs
• Describe key characteristics of survey designs
• Distinguish different methods of collecting data through questionnaires and interviews and how to design them
• Describe the steps in conducting survey research.

Don't Forget Your
Library Card!

Task #1:
Complete the Library Patron Feedback Form.

Contact the
Library Staff

Need Help?

Have a question but can't find the answer? Here are some options:

• Check the FAQ page to see if your question has already been answered.
• Email the Head Librarian (Dr. Curda) .
• Email the Assistant Librarian (Melissa).
• Check with the other library patrons.

Now let's move to our Library Lessons
for This Week!