False Confessions and How they Occur
Description
Because we want you to be prepared to communicate scientific findings to a wide variety of audiences, we want you to write these essays so that the general public (who might not have a solid understanding of scientific research) could understand them.
For each of your essays, here is what we would like to see you do:
Each essay should be written in APA format, particularly with respect to the way you cite and reference articles.
Imagine that a coworker, supervisor, or client asked you to report on and make policy recommendations about a forensic psychology issue.
You should think of your essay as a report that you might write for this purpose.
o Example:
A law enforcement agency wants to know what the current research says about how to conduct eyewitness lineups. You would conduct a literature search on recent papers that discuss, for example, whether possible suspects should be presented one-at-a-time or all-at-once.
After reading those articles, you would in theory have an idea of what way is best. Summarize all of that research and recommend what you then conclude is the best way to conduct the lineups.
Each essay should start with an overview of the topic. Summarize and explain what the topic is that you are going to write about.
Next, you should summarize the articles that we provided to you for your chosen topic. What did each article set out to learn? What did they do? What did they find? What conclusions did they make? Again, be sure to try and communicate this to a non-technical audience.
In addition, you should find at least one additional article on your topic by conducting a literature search on Google Scholar / PsycInfo / etc. This article should be directly relevant to your topic and fit in with the theme of your essay. Summarize this article along with the others.
Once you’ve done that, what might you say to people about what the research literature says about the topic? Thinking across all of the articles you’ve read, what are some common themes?
Again, thinking across all of the articles, what are some future research directions or unanswered questions that you think are important?
Finally, if an organization or agency wanted to develop some “best practices” based on scientific research, what are some recommendations you might make?
You can either do this generally, or identify a specific organization (perhaps one that is part of your career trajectory) and make recommendations that would be relevant to that group.
We would like your essay to be 4-5 pages double-spaced, which is about 1200-1500 words. You want to be sure to thoroughly explain the findings and recommendations, but do so in a brief way that stakeholders / organizations would not find to be too long of a read.
