The essay you write for this capstone assignment should be an example of your best work. This essay should take several hours to write. You are strongly encouraged to have a writing tutor review your essay prior to its submission. {There are online and on campus tutoring options.}
Since this is a capstone assignment, let’s review the four major learning objectives for this course:
Explain how the scientific method and psychological research methodologies are used to study the mind and behavior.
Recall key terms, concepts, and theories in the areas of neuroscience, learning, memory, cognition, intelligence, motivation and emotion, development, personality, health, disorders and therapies, and social psychology.
Explain how information provided in this course can be applied to life in the real world.
Identify the major theoretical schools of thought that exist in psychology as they relate to the self, the culture, and the society.
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With the above overarching goals in mind, here are the specific instructions for this assignment. In your essay:
Read the Social Psychology chapter then choose one significant topic/term from the chapter for your essay.
Locate a recent article in a popular media source that illustrates your chosen topic/term concept. Popular media sources can be found through an ordinary search engine (like Google) such as a newspaper (like the New York Times) or magazine article (Men’s Health). For your topic/term, avoid research by Asch, Milgram, and Zimbardo.
Discuss which Social Psychology concept the popular article is about and how it applies to real life. Make sure this concept (term) is in bold font (just once).
Then, on a scholarly search engine recommended by a librarian, locate a college level, peer reviewed, scholarly (research) journal article on the same topic. A scientific source is something like the Journal of Social Psychology.
Which research method (such as correlation, naturalistic observation, experiment from Ch. 02) was used for the research? Does the researcher seem to come from a particular branch of psychology (from Ch. 01, Psychoanalysis, Behaviorism, Humanism, etc).
Be sure to critically evaluate your topic by writing an essay which summarizes and compares and contrasts what the popular article says versus what the research article says about the concept.
Important:
You may use your textbook if you wish but this assignment is mostly about using the two outside sources described above. Papers that do not include a popular source and a scholarly research source (academic journal) will be graded 0 (the entire assignment).
Papers without APA in-text citation and an APA reference section will be scored 0 (the entire assignment).
An abstract and cover page are not required.
Minimum Length: the body of your essay must be at least two double spaced pages but most students will need to write about three pages to adequate cover the topics. Maximum Length: four double spaced pages. Do not fudge the page count (for example, large fonts, extra space and/or headers are not included in the page count). Essays which do not meet the minimum length requirement will be scored 0 (the entire assignment).