Final Project Presentation

Presentations will be December 2nd.

Final Project Writeup

You will use the R Markdown Template to writeup your project. The template allows you to write your final paper and include your R code and output in a single document, making your report highly reproducible. Your final paper is due December 9th (noon) on Canvas. It should include the following components:

Introduction:

• Minimum of 800 words.
• Introduce the question your MA addresses and why it is important
• Introduce seminal paper (method, finding, results)
• Briefly describe how other papers have built on the seminal paper
• Can reuse text from Assignment 6, after you have incorporated feedback from assignment

Methods:

• Minimum of 600 words
• Paper selection method (inclusion criteria)
• Description of variables coded
• Description of effect size measure
• Search protocol
• PRISMA flow diagram

Results:

• Include forest plot, funnel plot and moderator plots and describe the results of each.
• You should plot and discuss the results of at least 3 different moderators
• When you discuss the results of a moderator you should include two things: (1) What the effect is (e.g., “Older children showed a bigger mutual exclusivity effect”), and (2) What that means in plain English (e.g., “Older children were more likely to select the novel object, relative to the familiar object when presented with a novel word”).
• There is no minimum word count for the results section, but you should be sure to address the above topics

Discussion:

• Minimum of 800 words
• Summarize all of your results
• Interpret your moderators. What does the fact that you do or do not see an effect of each moderator mean? Why might that be the case>?
• How does this effect compare to other effect sizes in the psychology literature?
• What are some limitations of your method?
• What would you do if you had more time?

In addition to the content of your meta-analysis, your paper will be evaluated for a effectively you communicate your ideas (i.e., the clarity of the writing).

How to use the paper template

• How do I start writing my paper? To start working on your paper, open up the template in R Studio and fill in the information at the top (title, name, date), then delete the stuff that won’t go in your final paper (“[Your text here]” and the example figure). To get started writing, you can copy and paste revised versions of the paragraphs you wrote for Assignment 6 into the Introduction. You’ll need to edit the text your wrote previously so that your introduction is complete and flows, but your Assignment 6 text will give you a starting point.

• Where do I write stuff? Add your text directly to the Rmarkdown document, remembering to knit frequently to make sure you don’t have an error that will be difficult to track down later. When you get to the Method and Results section, you can add R chunks to include your analyses in your paper. Most of this code you should be able to adapt from your “final_project_analyses.Rmd” markdown.

• How do I check spelling and count words? Rstudio has a built-in spell checker. It’s the little green check mark with “ABC” at the top, next to the Knit button. Unfortunately, R Studio does not have a build in word counter. To count words, copy and paste your text into a word processer (like google docs) or use an online counter.

• How do I include figures? An example figure is included in the template. To include a figure, simply include the plotting code in an R chunk, just like you normally would. The only difference is because this is a report, you’ll need to add a caption to your figure. This is done by adding the argument fig.cap = "blah" to the R chunk (see example in the template).

• What do I put in the results section? You should present each of your figures and describe the findings. You won’t have any statistics to report other than the overall meta-analytic effect size and the corresponding confidence interval.

• Where can I see an example of how to write up my meta-analysis? To get a general sense of how to write up your meta-analysis, you should look at this paper and the meta-analysis portion of this paper .

• How do I include references? Paste the APA citation for any references you cite in the reference section (this will probably be your seminal paper, the citation for the metafor package you used to analyze your data, and a few others).

• How do I turn in my paper? Turn in the .Rmd and .html on Canvas just like a normal assignment. I’ll only look at the .html when I grade, so make sure it looks beautiful! I’ll look at the .Rmd if I have questions about what you did.