STEP 1: Students will read a scholarly journal article and a non-scholarly article about Optimism that will be provided in the course and write a summary for the Introduction Section of their paper. Items to consider when reading the articles include noting the issue, methodology, and results.
STEP 2: Students will next collect data by requesting 30 people to complete an Optimism Questionnaire provided in the course. Fifteen of the questionnaires must be completed by men and 15 of the questionnaires must be completed by women.
STEP 3: Students must enter the data into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that is provided in the course, and then analyze the data. Information on how to enter the data into the Excel Spreadsheet, analyze the data, and write up the results can be found on the Working on the Optimism Project in Excel page. Students must save a completed Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, including calculations and graphs to submit with the final paper.
STEP 4: Students will write an APA formatted, written report with the following sections.
Paper Sections:
* Introduction: Briefly summarize the concept (needs to be approximately 300 words)
* Refer to the scholarly peer-reviewed article and the non-scholarly article to discuss the concept.
* Methodology: Briefly describe the following with regard to data collection (make a separate heading for each subheading below):
* Participants
* Discuss any important demographic information such as age of participants etc.
* Materials
* Describe the questionnaire—number of items and the response set (i.e. the Likert scale options)
* Procedure
* Describe how the data was collected –how did you find participants and ask them to participate
* Results: Briefly summarize the statistical findings from the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and address the questions in the data set instructions about the data. This section will include a frequency polygon and content from the textbook as students answer questions about the results. Tables and graphs from Excel Spreadsheet must be integrated into the results section of this paper. Students will also assume normality and apply an independent t-test to analyze if the difference between two groups is statistically significant. Refer to the data set instructions for guidelines on what to include in the results section. Make sure to cite the textbook in this section.
* Discussion: Briefly summarize the interpretation of the findings (i.e. what do the findings mean in relation to the concept), the importance of the findings, and relate it back to the information from one of the required sources. (Needs to be approximately 300 words)
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