Communicating Psych Science

Three Things You Can do to Make Your Data Tables More Visual

Tables that contain a lot of data can be difficult to understand. This article from PolicyViz.com shows a few ways to make that information more manageable by simplifying information, highlighting key pieces, and using the right type of chart. You can find the full article here.

Activity: What’s Wrong with This Paragraph?

This activity includes a highly plagiarized paragraph along with the original source material to allow students to identify problem areas. There is an answer key for instructors as well as a “solution” paragraph without plagiarism. Click here for a link to the assignment

Jamovi Assignments that Teach Climate Change

Kimberly A. Barchard (LinkedIn), Matthew R. Helm, John D. Watt , Kaelyn Griffin, from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas have created a series of Jamovi assignments. These 10 assignments include step-by-step instructions to take students from the basics of opening data files to the complexities of creating a professional conference poster (complete with literature review, method, results, graph, and …

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Developing a Good Elevator Pitch

Being able to communicate your study’s purpose quickly and effectively is important. Often we need to share our science with non-experts, so being able to capture others’ interest in an engaging way from the start, helps them see the value of our work. Elevator pitches are traditionally thought of in the context of a job …

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Write with Purpose: What Do You Want Your Paragraph To Do?

Students often have the greatest anxiety about writing the Introduction and Discussion sections of an APA style paper. Part of the problem is that they struggle with writing properly constructed paragraphs. This guide from the University of Newcastle not only describes several types of paragraphs, but outlines what the topic, supporting, and concluding sentences should …

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Video: Misunderstanding Scientific Studies (with John Oliver)

On this short (4:05) clip from Last Week Tonight, John Oliver outlines how to be a better consumer of scientific information (e.g., don’t give too much significance to individual studies) and how communication to the public can misinterpret findings altogether.

Principles to Improve Instructional Videos’ Effectiveness

This is an article on The Effortful Educator from Blake Harvard (Twitter: @effortfuleduktr) that reviews “Five ways to increase the effectiveness of instructional video.” Going forward, because more of us will need to create videos for our courses, we should learn as much as we can about making those videos as effective as possible. In …

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Video: How-To Create a #BetterPoster

An in-depth presentation from Mike Morrison (you can find him on Twitter @MikeMorrison) about the need for a #betterposter. If this doesn’t convince you that we need to revamp how we present scientific information at conferences, nothing will. Want to find templates for creating better posters? Click here. The next video is a deeper dive …

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Practice Creating an Outline for an APA Style Introduction Based on Notes

This resource helps students practice the process of outlining an APA style Introduction based on notes taken on research articles. It provides note sheets from 8 research articles and a template to help students plan and organize the structure of an APA style Introduction. Please click here for the file.

Investigating Claims Made by the Media

This assignment helps students practice scientific literacy and literature searches. Students find a media posting that makes a psychology-related scientific claim and a peer-reviewed research article that speaks to that claim. Students then write an essay evaluating the media claim based on the scientific conclusions. Please click here for the file.

Student Guide to SPSS and APA Style Writing (v.12.0)

This guide (created by Gary Lewandowski; Twitter: @LewandowskiPhD) is a free resource that can substitute for the APA Manual and SPSS guides. The Student Guide leads students through data analysis in SPSS with step-by-step instructions and screenshots for setting up the analyses and interpreting the output. For each analysis, students also see an example SPSS …

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APA Style (7th Edition): Annotated Sample Papers (Professional & Student)

One of the most helpful resources instructors can provide for students is a solid example. To facilitate learning APA Style, the APA has provided several sample papers for both professional and student formats. Here are two annotated examples: Professional Paper – Annotated Version (Sample Only Version) Student Paper – Annotated Version (Sample Only Version)

APA Style (7th Edition): Avoiding Several Types of Plagiarism

Students can always use additional information about plagiarism as a refresher. In this handout from the APA, they distinguish between word plagiarism and idea plagiarism, as well as discuss “patchwriting.” (which may be a new concept for students) You can find the handout here.