You’ll be writing a lab report on the driving and distraction study that we did in intro lab last semester.
forr your sources, you must use the following published research on distracted driving (included with assignment):
Strayer, Drews & Johnston (2003); Strayer & Johnston (2001); Beck, Yan & Wang (2007). All three are attached in pdf form. Be careful not to plagiarize the phrases or sentences used by these authors. If you have any questions about these or about what constitutes plagiarism, please email me your questions.
As noted in the guidelines for the report, you should have two citations in your intro and one in your discussion. You MAY use any two of the sources above and then use one of them again in the discussion, but I prefer that you use all three in your paper (two in the intro and the third in your discussion). That makes for a more interesting paper.
For the Method section, you will need to know the following:
Number of participants –> 18
Gender –> not recorded, mixed
Age range –> 17-23 years
Recruitment –> Enrolled in psych lab class
Compensation –> Course credit for participation
Materials –> The website we used to measure driving is at the top of page 231, right under the heading. Go to that website and run the program a few times to figure out out to describe it. Let me know if you have any trouble running it. Other materials: Four word lists. One of them is attached so that you can use it as a sample to describe what the four word lists looked like.
For the procedure, you will have to refresh your memory on how we collected data in lab. Detailed procedures are listed on page 231 of the lab textbook (Procedure 2, Study 7B). Make sure you use those procedures to refresh your memory, NOT “Procedure 1, 7B” on page 229. In lab, we used Procedure 2. Also, follow the guidelines for how to write a Method section described on pages 281-282. Stay GENERAL in your description of the procedure we used to collect data. The procedure on page 231 are detailed instructions for pairs of participants, you cannot simply retype them as your method section. Instead, your goal is to describe the design of the whole study in general terms, with enough detail that someone else could replicate it if they wanted to. This might be the hardest part — let me know if you have questions.
Here is the WHOLE Results section, verbatim. Simply copy and paste the following sentence and remove the quotation marks around it:
“In the conversation condition, participants had significantly higher driving impairment scores (M= 0.46 secs, SD = 0.11) than they did in the repetition condition (M = 0.38 secs, SD = 0.07), t(17) = 2.71, p < .05 (Figure 1).”
Discussion: As noted above, please use the third source (whatever article of the three above that you did not already use in the introduction).
References put them in APA format, as described on page 285 & 286 of the lab textbook. You should be able to get exact journal titles and volume numbers, and page numbers from the attached versions or from Lafayette database (PsycInfo, as described in lab — if in doubt, ask me).
Figure: I am also attaching a graph of our results, but it is not in APA format. It is your job to put it in APA and write a properly formatted figure caption, as described on pages 286 and 287.
