Instructions for Article Summaries
Purpose: The purpose is to expose you to research conducted in the field of learning and behavior.
Article Topics: The articles may be on any topic either in the field of animal learning and behavior, or human learning and behavior.
Article Types: You must choose an article that describes an actual experiment (i.e., the researchers manipulated at least one variable). Refrain from summarizing summary-type articles (e.g., meta-analyses summarizing lots and lots of research other people have done, but no experiments of their own), survey papers (e.g., articles using questionnaires), and/or opinion pieces.
Summary Length: Your summary should be approximately 1-2 pages in length, double-spaced with 12- point font (please use a standard font such as Times New Roman or Calibri). If you need more than 2 pages to write your summary, that is fine; but try to limit your summary to at most 3 pages. Learning to summarize effectively and write concisely is a good skill to practice.
Content of Summary:
What was the primary question(s) of interest? In other words, what motivated the study? What did they hope to gain by doing this research?
What is currently known about this topic? What does the prior research tell us in this area? (Note: The authors should briefly summarize the prior literature for you in the introduction. Use that to answer this question – you do not need to dive any deeper than that).
What did the researchers predict would happen? What were their hypotheses?
What was the methodology and procedure of each experiment? How did they measure what they wanted to measure?
What were the main findings from each experiment? 6. What are the main conclusions of this article?
Note: You can answer these questions in any order within your summary, but I would STRONGLY RECOMMEND using this as your outline. You can even use these numbers (1-6) and simply answer each question for your summary (e.g., “1. The authors were interested in XYZ…”).
Point values:
1 – Main research question(s) (1 points)
2 – Background literature summary (1 point)
3 – Main predictions (1 points)
4 – Methodology and Procedure (1 points)
5 – Main findings and conclusions (1 points)
6 – Writing Quality (5 points)
Things to avoid:
Typos
Run-on sentences
Contractions (don’t => do not, etc.)
Poor grammar
Long, tedious sentences
Stream of consciousness writing
Do NOT write as ideas come to mind! Organize your ideas with an outline first, and then write from the outline!
Things to do:
Write short, direct sentences with 1 main idea
Outline first – write second
Subject-verb agreement
Proofread carefully
Use a formal, professional tone
Do NOT write the same way you text your friends! Write like you are sending an email to a potential employer – formal and professional.
Places to find articles:
ProQuest (PsycINFO): http://www.proquest.com/products-services/psycinfo-set-c.html
Click on the LOGIN button. Select NKU on the next page and enter your login credentials. This resource is great for finding research articles by searching for the author information, topic you are interested in, year range, etc.
Google scholar: https://scholar.google.com/
This resource is also very good for finding research articles but lacks some of the features available in PsycINFO One benefit is that you can forward-cite articles. If you find Article A, you can then click a button to find all the other researchers who have cited Article A since it was published. This can be useful to find newer research on a particular topic of interest to you.
Additional information can be obtained via the NKU Library: http://steelylibrary.nku.edu/
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