Chapter 5 Moodle forum post

Add a Moodle forum post about an interesting study or finding to the General forum by Friday, 7 October.

Step 1: What is the most interesting psychological study (or finding) you heard about during A-levels?

  • If you didn’t take A-level psychology, feel free to mention any interesting psychological study or finding you heard about.

Step 2: Has this study already been mentioned on the forum?

  • Search the forum to find this out. How to search Moodle forums is explained in Section 1.3. (You could also scan the subject lines of previous posts, but please make sure to also try out the search, so you know how it works.)

If the study has not been mentioned yet: Step 3a: Add a forum post for this study.

  • Click on “Add a new discussion topic”.
  • Choose a subject that briefly describes the study (e.g., something along the lines of “Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment”).
  • In the message part, briefly describe the study and its main findings.
  • It would be great if you could also explain why you find it interesting.

If the study has already been mentioned: Step 3b: Reply to the previous post about this study and add something new.

  • It is really important that you reply to the previous forum post that mentioned the particular study, because otherwise reading the posts will get rather confusing. Please note that we will delete posts that do not follow these instructions.
  • To reply to a post, simply click on the post and then on “reply”.
  • In your reply, add something that has not yet been mentioned (you only need to add one of the things mentioned below). For example:
    • Add information about the study that has not yet been mentioned (e.g., another interesting result or information about the methodology)
    • If you find the study interesting for a different reason than the one originally mentioned, explain what you find it interesting about it.
    • Reference the original publication (where possible with a link to the online publication or a link to a website where a PDF of the study can be downloaded).
    • Find out if the study has been replicated. If yes, add the reference. If not, add that you could not find a replication attempt.
    • Find out if the data the study is based on are publicly available. If yes, add a link to the data. If not, add this information.
    • Add a link to an article or a webpage that discusses the study.
    • Is this study an experiment? Why/why not?
    • Read the original publication. Is it similar to what you learned previously? Was anything misrepresented?

Please note that a slightly annoying feature of Moodle is that by default it sends e-mail notifications for each new forum post, which can result in you receiving many e-mails. Luckily, there are ways in which you can change this behaviour. Appendix C explains how to do this.