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Reading Reports of Empirical Studies

This module was developed to help you learn how to read empirical research reports. Empirical research reports are written in a specific style to make it easier for researchers to read and understand the research. However, it takes a while to get used to this style. There is a lot of jargon you may not be used to reading and a lots of complex issues are handled in a very different way from a book chapter, an essay, or a newspaper article.

This module helps you learn how to read and understand empirical research articles by posing a series of questions. These questions should help you think critically about the research. Print out the questions (on the Questions to Consider page) and refer to them as you read the published report. Then use the summary to help identify and think about key information. The critical thinking questions are located along the side of different sections of the summary. There are two types of questions:
      Factual questions, identified by the
and
      Discussion questions, identified by the

The factual questions help you think about key points in the research (such as Who were the participants? and What were the research questions?). Each question is accompanied by a self-test. This test is not graded but will help you test your own knowledge of the research.

The discussion questions allow you to pursue some specific issues related to the research (such as Is this research important?) in greater detail. The discussion questions point to the discussion group so that you can argue about different aspects of the research in a small discussion group. To access your discussion group, click on the discussion icon and then click on your group. Navigate through the topics until you get to the correct question in the correct research article.

How do I navigate through this module?

There is a navigation menu at the bottom of each page. It looks like:

	Reading the Research			Questions to Consider
	Title	Abstract	Introduction	Method	Results	Discussion	References

Each menu item points to a different page in this module. The top two items (Reading Research and Questions to Consider) orient you to the task of reading and thinking about an empirical research article. The bottom menu items point to different parts of the summary of the empirical research report.

The first time you use this module, you might want to go through each page in order, starting with Reading Research and Questions to Consider and then working through all the sections of the summary. Later, you might just want to concentrate on different sections of the report summary.

Icon	Name	Description
	Help!	This is what you clicked at the top of the page to get you here.
	Self-test	Click on this to answer a self-test question to make sure you know the details of the research.
	Discussion	Click on this to go to the Discussion group to discuss a question. Select your discussion group and navigate to the discussion questions for the article.
	Site to Visit	This icon tells you when you are about to leave the Psyco 105 site. Warning: You may experience difficulty accessing this new site. You will need to click your browser's Back button to return to Psyco 105. If all else fails, make sure you have bookmarked our Psyco 105 site so you can get back to it if you get lost.