Article Review
The purpose of this assignment is to familiarize you with current research, library resources, standards of writing, and APA format. For this assignment, you will need to find a scholarly article through the library database in the field of Psychology that relates to child or adolescent development. The article you choose must be an original experiment or correlational study (rather than a theoretical paper or meta-analysis).
Step 1 – Find an article
Find a current (within the last 10 years) scholarly article that describes the processes and outcomes of an original research experiment. The UC library will allow you to access databases of current journal articles. PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES are two excellent search engines for articles in the field. ERIC is also an excellent resource for both psychology and education. When accessing these databases, look for peer reviewed journal articles, and be sure they have the full text available.
- Look for a scholarly psychological article published in a journal
- Be sure it is related to development (population is 25 years or younger)
- It is an experiment or correlational study (identify the variables and method)
- It was published within the last 10 years
Original experiments often use headings and you should be able to identify the following parts of the study fairly easily (after the literature review):
- Method, Participants, Measures, Procedures, Results, Discussion
Step 2 – Describe the Study (2-3 pages)
Your paper needs to begin with an introduction to the article (no abstract is needed), followed by a summary which answers the following questions (write in 3rd person):
- What was the major research question that was being addressed?
- Did the authors test a particular theory or hypothesis? Describe.
- Who were the participants?
- How was the research conducted? Describe the method and measurement tools.
- What were the results?
- Were the authors’ hypotheses supported?
- Did the authors mention any limitations to the study?
- Did the authors describe any future research suggestions?
Step 3 – Critique (1-2 pages)
The second part of the paper needs to include an evaluation of the study. Some questions that would assist in making a good critique might include:
- How effectively was the study conducted? (For example: how representative was the sample? What other variables did they consider that might influence their outcome? Did they control for any of these?)
- How reliable were the measures? (Did they used an established instrument, or create their own?) Did they discuss reliability and validity of the instruments used?
- What extraneous confounding variables may have influenced the findings?
- Did the authors’ conclusions make sense based on the data?
- Are there any limitations to the study that the authors failed to mention?
- How generalizable are the findings?
- What future research studies could build on the current findings?
Step 4
Write a concluding paragraph summarizing your thoughts about the article (stay in 3rd person).
Step 5
Review your work. Is your paper written in APA format? Be sure to include a title page, in-text citations and a reference page. Use Grammarly to help assess your writing. Do not use quotes in this paper. Summarize the article in your own words.