Instructions for Article Summaries
Purpose: The purpose is to expose you to research conducted in the field of learning and behavior.
Article Topics: The articles may be on any topic either in the field of animal learning and behavior, or human learning and behavior.
Article Types: You must choose an article that describes an actual experiment (i.e., the researchers manipulated at least one variable). Refrain from summarizing summary-type articles (e.g., meta-analyses summarizing lots and lots of research other people have done, but no experiments of their own), survey papers (e.g., articles using questionnaires), and/or opinion pieces.
Summary Length: Your summary should be approximately 1-2 pages in length, double-spaced with 12- point font (please use a standard font such as Times New Roman or Calibri). If you need more than 2 pages to write your summary, that is fine; but please try to limit your summary to at most 3 pages. Learning to summarize effectively and write concisely is a good skill to practice!
Content of Summary:
1. What was the primary question(s) of interest? In other words, what motivated the study? What did they hope to gain by doing this research?
2. What is currently known about this topic? What does the prior research tell us in this area? (Note: The authors should briefly summarize the prior literature for you in the introduction. Use that to answer this question – you do not need to dive any deeper than that).
3. What did the researchers predict would happen? What were their hypotheses?
4. What was the methodology and procedure of each experiment? How did they measure what they wanted to measure?
5. What were the main findings from each experiment? 6. What are the main conclusions of this article?
