Questions about Discussion section of Coursework

Hallo all, thanks in advance for any replies.

My coursework on "Emotional Factors in Forgetting" is due next week and I am just a little stuck on the Discussion section, and I have a few questions that I've not found answers to from searching around.

- Should I analyse the data as a whole and then focus in on one or two individual results to analyse it in detail?
- Is this the place to point out any possible anomalous results and offer possible reasons for them?
- How do you reference material and studies that you stated in the Introduction without repeating yourself?
- Should I mention my pilot study and how I had to completely change my method, or would that lose me marks?

If there is anything else you'd like to add aside from answering any of the above questions, please do.

Thank you very much.

JackintheBox :suitc:

Reply 1

Melana

JackintheBox

Hallo all, thanks in advance for any replies.

- Should I analyse the data as a whole and then focus in on one or two individual results to analyse it in detail?
- Is this the place to point out any possible anomalous results and offer possible reasons for them?
- How do you reference material and studies that you stated in the Introduction without repeating yourself?
- Should I mention my pilot study and how I had to completely change my method, or would that lose me marks?
JackintheBox :suitc:

- You should talk about all the results, not in terms of numbers (you should have done that in your results section) but in terms of what they suggest in terms of your study. If you don't discuss them all, there was no point in testing for them!

- If there were any big outliers, I would have eliminated them in the results section, but if not, yeah, just have a short point about possible reasons. Don't spend a lot of time on this.

- Repeat yourself. Well, say 'the results of the current study show that people like jam, supporting Jam, et al (2000)'. Or the opposite, if it doesn't support it. If it doesn't, offer possible reasons why not.

- You should have done the pilot before your method, I wouldn't mention the word 'change', I would have started my method saying 'a pilot study was used', say a small bit about it, and how it then influenced the method of your main study. Don't say 'i found out my experiment was crap so i changed it' sort of thing. Pilot studies look good though, but they are done to determine how you go about your method. I wouldn't admit any previous different ideas, basically!

- You also want to talk about your results in terms of what they imply about the bigger picture, how you can relate them to the real world! Also, any ideas for extending your study, or focussing further on one particular aspect that would help validity. You can identify problems with your experiment here, but don't slate it. You want to say things like 'One potential criticism of the current study was that we only used one type of jam; further research could focus on the effects of different types of jam' etc etc.

YAY. I like discussions. It's just an excuse to bitch. :smile: