Your Research in Psychology
Resources
As we mentioned in the project description, research is at the core of psychology practice whether you conduct it yourself or apply evidence-based strategies and techniques in your professional practice. In Unit 2, you focused your passions and interests in psychology and created a research question to search the literature within your specialized field. In Unit 6, you practiced using critical thinking frameworks to evaluate the quality of research and reviewed strategies for integrating literature to prepare for application in practice. This assignment provides an opportunity to receive feedback to help you further refine your research interests, reflect on the role of scholarship in your career vision, and practice evaluating and synthesizing evidence to apply in your profession. Complete the following:
Topics and Research
To begin your journey into the research and literature in your field, reflect on the vision and goals you developed in your first assignment and reflect on your passions and areas of interest in psychology. Once you have an idea of the scope of your interests, audience, environment, and other details about your vision, formulate a research question that will provide you with more knowledge and skills for contributing to the field of psychology. As you create your question, think about the four W’s—who, what, why, and where. Here are a couple of examples to illustrate:
What are the best practices for treating individuals of diverse cultural backgrounds?
How does technology impact learning in the elementary school classroom?
What might explain the increase in the number of children diagnosed with developmental disorders, such as autism and Asperger’s?
Is there a relationship between leadership and emotional intelligence?
What role does birth order play in personality development?
From there, familiarize yourself with scholarly journals and other resources available in the Capella library and locate at least three peer–reviewed articles relevant to your research question. ThePSY5002 Research Guide linked in the Resources provides suggested topics for the specializations and information to help you work through this part of your assignment.
Literature Evaluation and Synthesis
The American Psychological Association (2012) stresses the application of the highest quality research available to support the application of techniques, strategies, and best practices in psychology. It is important to not only evaluate the quality of your research, but also synthesize themes in the literature relevant to your professional practice, and thoughtfully apply the research to reach a desired outcome in practice.
The next step in your assignment is to evaluate the reliability, credibility, value, and relevance of your research and integrate your research articles into a cohesive review of the literature to respond to your initial research question. Key activities for this work include comparing your research articles to identify patterns and different answers to your research question and distilling your ideas down to at least three themes to structure the body paragraphs of your literature review. You then will identify supporting ideas from each of your references that support your three themes. Granello’s 2001 article, “Promoting Cognitive Complexity in Graduate Written Work: Using Bloom’s Taxonomy as a Pedagogical Tool to Improve Literature Reviews,” provides a framework and strategies to help you work through this part of your assignment.
Application and Research Vision
Once you identify your themes and analyze the literature, you are ready to apply the techniques, strategies, best practices, and other findings to your professional practice. The final step in this assignment is to discuss how you would apply these findings to your future professional practice in psychology. Also, describe how research fits into your future vision and goals for your career. Craft additional goals related to research and revise your vision to integrate research and scholarship in your specialized field of psychology.
Assignment Requirements
Your assignment should also meet the following requirements:
Length: 5–7 typed and double-spaced, Times New Roman 12-point content pages (length excludes title page, abstract, table of contents, and reference list).
References: At least 3 scholarly references.
Written communication: Must be free of errors, scholarly, professional, and consistent with expectations for members of the profession of psychology.
Writing Style: APA expectations for scholarly writing includes the use of third-person narrative.
APA formatting: Must be formatted according to APA (6th edition) style and formatting and include a title page, abstract, table of contents, and reference list.
Use the Your Research in Psychology Scoring Guide to self-assess your completed assignment prior to turning it into your instructor for feedback to ensure you meet all evaluation criteria.
Note: Your instructor may also use the APA Writing Feedback Rubric to provide additional feedback on your academic writing. The writing feedback rubric does not affect your assignment grade, but its feedback may factor into the professional communication and writing grading criteria. Evaluate your own work using this rubric. Refer to the Learner Guide for instructions on viewing instructor feedback.
Reference
American Psychological Association. (2012).What do practicing psychologists do? Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/helpcenter/about-psychologists.aspx

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