The Effect of Study Strategy and Mind Wandering - Education Assignment Help

Assignment Task

The assignments in this unit are designed to help you develop important skills in research methods, critical thinking, and writing a short APA-style journal article (referred to as a lab report in psychology courses).
In the lab report, you will review the relevant literature, present a hypothesis, describe the results, and discuss the implications of the findings. The learning materials and supporting resources will help you to develop the relevant skills and knowledge necessary to complete this assignment.

Assignment details Topic: The effect of study strategy and mind wandering on students’ learning
This lab report examines the effects of two different studying techniques on people’s test performance: massed practice versus distributed practice. Massed practice refers to studying or rehearsing information in one period (i.e. cramming), whereas distributed practice (also known as spaced practice) refers to spacing out the time spent studying over several sessions with a break in between (see Figure 1 from Carpenter et al., 2012, p. 370).
Figure 1 Design of a typical study on the spacing effect (2012) supplied by Carpenter, Cepeda, Rohrer, Kang, & Pashler, p. 370
Importantly, the key difference is not the amount of time spent studying, but rather when the person spends the time studying and how much time passes between study periods. For example, you can either study for eight hours straight for an exam (i.e. massed practice), or you can study for one hour each across eight different days (i.e. distributed practice).
In addition to exploring study strategy, in this lab report, you will also examine the relationship between mind wandering during studying and people’s ability to learn and recall information (Risko et al., 2012). Mind wandering is a growing topic of research that builds on existing knowledge about the importance of attention in encoding. Thus, you will also learn about the research into the role of attention and staying on task when trying to learn information.
The topic of study strategy and mind wandering were chosen for your lab report because:
there is a wealth of research for you to draw upon
it is relevant to material you will cover in the Week 3 learning material on Memory
it may shape your own studying strategies in this unit and beyond.
To begin this assignment, you should read:

We had two main research questions:
Which study strategy will lead to the most accurate test performance?
Is there a relationship between mind wandering and test performance? If so, what is the strength and direction of the relationship?

Method - Please note: You do not need to paraphrase this 'Method' information. This will not be considered plagiarism. However, you will need to ensure that the text and headings are in APA style.
Participants
Students (N = 126) enrolled in first-year psychology units completed this study in exchange for course credit. Data from 12 participants who did not complete the study were excluded. The majority of participants in the final sample (N = 114) self-identified as female (63.16%), with ages ranging from 18–67 years (M = 20.87, SD = 4.32).

Materials
Demographics questions. Participants answered two questions: “Please indicate your age (in years): <open-ended>” and “Please indicate your gender: <open-ended>.”
Study material. All participants studied the 'Research in Psychology' chapter of the Bernstein et al. (2018) eText.
Test material. All participants were tested with 20 fill-in-the-blank items (see Appendix A).
Mind-wandering probe. Following Risko et al. (2012), we asked participants, 'Were you mind wandering?', and provided them with 'Yes' and 'No' response options.
Instructions. All participants were advised that they would need to schedule their study session(s) at a designated computer room during a two-week period. Participants in the massed practice condition were advised that they would need to study for four hours in one sitting. Participants in the spaced practice condition were advised that they would need to study for two hours on two consecutive days.
Procedure ( I will provide these REP details next week)
Students signed up for this three-part online study through the Research experience program (REP) and were presented with the consent information statement through the Qualtrics platform. After agreeing to participate by selecting 'Continue', participants were directed to Part 1 of the study.
In Part 1, participants were randomly assigned to one of the two study strategy conditions (massed practice versus spaced practice) and presented with the respective instructions. Participants were then asked to schedule their study sessions. Participants in the massed practice condition had to select one 4-hour block, whereas participants in the spaced practice condition had to select two 2-hour blocks on consecutive days. Participants had 5 minutes to complete Part 1.
In Part 2, participants attended their scheduled study session. Upon arriving at the computer room, participants answered the demographics questions. Participants were advised that they would be presented with the on-screen mind-wandering probe at random intervals during their computer-based study session. All participants received a total of 12 mind-wandering probes, which were presented randomly within 20-minute increments.
For Part 3, participants were advised to log in to Qualtrics two weeks after their final study session to complete the research methods test. Participants had a maximum of 25 minutes to complete the test.
Please note: This ends the written text that can be included in your lab report without paraphrasing.

Summary statistics - In the Results section, it is important to first introduce the data (e.g. how the data was scored and how it is presented) before presenting the results. Participants’ responses on the 20-item test were marked as either correct or incorrect. Participants’ responses to the 12 mind-wandering probes were tallied; higher mind-wandering scores indicate more instances of mind wandering (i.e. that they responded 'Yes' to the mind-wandering probes). We calculated the correlation between each participant’s mind-wandering scores and their test score.
Please note: No additional data or inferential analyses are required for your assignment beyond what is presented below. This is not a statistics assignment so the focus is not on performing statistical analyses. Instead, we are assessing whether you can clearly present and summarise descriptive data, interpret patterns in the data, integrate the results with previous literature, and discuss the implications of your results.
The following info shows the descriptive statistics for participants’ test scores in the two conditions (massed practice and spaced practice) and their overall test score collapsed across study strategy condition. It also shows the correlation coefficient between mind wandering and test performance.
Study strategy Number of correct answers
-- M SD N
Massed 13.45 1.54 58
Spaced 18.53 1.14 56
Overall 15.99 1.36 114
M = mean; SD = standard deviation; N = number of participants in each condition.
Mind wandering score: M = 7.23, SD = 2.47, N=114Correlation with test performance = –.46.
Please note: You should not include these tables exactly as presented here, but instead should use the data to describe and illustrate the results. It is up to you to decide which data needs to be reported in your Results section, but you must present at least one figure (not a table).
You are welcome to illustrate participants’ test performance according to the mean number of correct responses or you may wish to calculate:
proportions (i.e. divide the mean by 20 [the number of items on the test]), or
percentages (i.e. divide the mean by 20 and multiply that number by 100).
Regardless of your choice, be sure to include a label for the y-axis so your marker can interpret the results.
 

POINTS to remember
Introduction.
Your introduction should include a brief literature review about the key independent variables (i.e. massed practice versus distributed practice). You should develop an argument about how these two studying techniques might influence participants’ test performance.
A literature review provides a critical summary of key literature on the topic and builds a logical argument leading to your hypotheses.
Beyond the two starter articles provided, you should use at least three additional peer-reviewed journal articles as the basis for your introduction. Your literature review should clearly define key terms and build an argument that leads logically to your hypotheses and should address the following points:
What is massed practice? What is distributed practice?
How do these studying techniques affect performance?
What is mind wandering and how does it relate to learning?
The introduction should culminate in logical and explicit hypotheses related to the research question(s). In particular, you must develop two hypotheses related to:
Which study strategy will lead to the most accurate test performance?
Is there a relationship between mind wandering and test performance? If so, what is the strength and direction of the relationship?

Discussion.
This section should provide a theoretical interpretation of the data and a critique of our study that integrates your findings within the broader literature.
Your discussion section should follow this general guide:
Begin with an interpretation of your results with respect to your hypotheses. Comment specifically on whether spaced versus massed practice influenced participants’ test scores, and whether mind wandering was associated with test performance.
Integrate/explain your findings with respect to the literature you drew upon in the introduction. Comment specifically on similarities or differences of our findings from previous studies, and how those variations might relate to the results.
Following from your explanation, the implications of your findings should be discussed and the consequences they have for theory or practice.
Critique the study including a discussion of the internal and external validity of the study (review your notes/reading on research methodology). Importantly, you should discuss any relevant limitations to the study.
ur reference list should include at least five peer-reviewed journal articles—the two starter articles and three additional articles.
You must include a reference list at the end of your assignment. Both citations and references must be in APA format.
Citations refer to in-text mentions of an article (e.g. in your Introduction) whereas the References section is found at the end of a lab report and contains all articles cited in the text. Your citations and references should match (i.e., if you cite something in the body of the lab report, it should appear in the reference list, and vice versa).
Your lab report should be written clearly, be free of grammatical and punctuation errors, and be written in APA format.

Results.
This section should summarise the parts of our data relevant to your hypotheses. In particular:
You must present a figure (NOT a table) comparing the accuracy rates for participants in the massed practice versus spaced practice conditions.
Describe what the figure shows; that is, discuss the pattern of results. Do not provide a theoretical interpretation of your results in this section (save it for the discussion).
You must also describe the relationship between participants’ mind wandering during study and participants’ performance on their test. This may be done in text.
Marks will be awarded for accurate, economical, and logical, presentation of data.

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