Covering anything not covered already in the assignment brief
Note that postgraduate students do not do this assessment.
Yes! Here are the top 2 assignments from last year’s class, plus the marker notes, kindly provided with approval by their authors. I have made redactions so you can’t see the student names, and I have also redacted the entry for one article entirely, since it comes from the assignment reading list and you might want to review that article yourself. Do not provide a review of the articles covered in these example assignments in your own assignment - they are quite idiosyncratic, which is why I am happy to share, you should find your own papers to cover, or pick stuff from the course reading list. Example 1. Example 2. The marks they got for each entry are at the end - note that the second example got a low-ish mark for their first entry, so you can compare how that differs from the more successful entries.
This is just to help me see how the papers you are reading lead towards some (potentially vague at this stage!) plan for Assessment 2. For instance, if you review a paper on sequence learning in kittens I am going to be wondering how that fits into your plan for Assessment 2, but if you say in your annotated bibliography “I was interested in sequence learning, and I think the method used in this paper will be ideal for an online sequence learning task with human participants, for the following reasons: …” then I can see how it fits, plus you get credit for spotting an interesting and relevant paper and for explicitly explaining your clever ideas about its potential relevance to me.
My preference would be for a separate references section at the end for anything you need to cite that is not one of your 4 annotated papers.
Yes absolutely! As long as it’s a proper paper and not just e.g. a 200 word abstract.
Yes absolutely!
Yes - but remember to explain why you are talking about them. For instance, for Assessment 2 you might be planning to build code to run something similar but online. Essentially no paper is off-limits, as long as you can clearly explain how it relates to this course and how it informs your plans for Assessment 2.
Yes definitely!
Yes! Here are 2 high-scoring assignments from last year’s class, plus the marker notes, kindly provided with approval by their authors. I have made redactions so you can’t see the student names or other identifying information, which means I had to take out the URLs for their experiments (which include student numbers) - so I copied their code over to my jspsychlearning profile, URLs below. The marks they are at the end of the report. Note that these reports are longer than the word limit for the postgraduate assignment this year.
NO. This is extremely important - you must not collect actual data! Apart from anything else, we don’t have the time or bandwidth to work through the ethical approval process with all of you, which is obligatory before collecting data. The idea is that this assessment gives you the opportunity to showcase your ability to build a well-motivated online experiment that’s designed to test a particular idea you set out in your report. But we are not running a full research project, so no data collection. It’s important that you test your experiment yourself so you can be confident it works, but no real data please!
Yes absolutely! As long as we can tell what you have in mind then that’s fine - the assessment is mainly about justifying a particular kind of experiment (in the report) and then putting that together in jsPsych (the actual code), not so much about producing professional-quality stimuli, so as long as we can tell what you intended then placeholders are fine.
Yes it is - we will deduct marks if you go over the word limit.
No it doesn’t - we don’t want to penalise you for reading and citing lots of relevant work.
Yes it does - I never want to read 5000 words of footnotes.
In principle we could use this to figure out who you are, but we will not do this. The logistics of setting up extra anonymous accounts is too complex and not worth the effort given that we have no interest in de-anonymising these! The thing we mostly want to avoid is people putting their actual name on their assignment, which happens more than you might think. So don’t do that.
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