AP Psychology Practice Question: Chapter 1: Experiments

AP Psychology Practice Question

Only a DRAFT!

May change/be updated - still in progress - may still contain inaccuracies

In order to perform an experiment to test the memory of words, I would first have to create a hypothesize about how much repetition is required to memorize a list of words. My hypothesis is that there is a relationship between how long a list is rehearsed and how many words are remembered.

For the sample I would select the participants from a the population randomly. I would have to randomly ask people to be part of the experiment without regard to their gender, intelligence, or any thing else, since that would slant the experiment. Because I am not testing any of these factors, I would not want them to influence my experiment. In order to properly randomly select a sample without bias I must select from the entire population. If I only picked from high school students, I would have a biased sample.

The independent variable is what I change as part of the experiment. In this experiment, the thing which changes as part as an experiment is the amount of time the test subject may look at the list of the words. The dependent variable is what is suppose to change as part of the experiment. In this case it is the number of words which are remembered when the subject is asked to recite the words they were supposed to memorize.

I would then divide the subjects into multiple groups randomly. I would assign some of the groups to be the experimental groups (each which are allowed a different lenght of time to look at this list). I would then assign one of the groups to be the control group, which is only allowed to look at the the list for a second.

I would make sure all of the other variables remain the same. I would make sure the list of words was the same and presented the same way. I would make sure that there were not any distracters in the room. In order to reduce experimental bias, I would not let the people (know who what

computer show words automatically

varied word lenght