The introduction of the internal

The introduction of the internal assessment provides a rationale for the investigation. It must contain relevant previous research or background material, developing logically into a discussion of the reasoning behind the current study, and with a clear statement of the investigation’s aim(s) and/or hypotheses. A good introduction should provide a logical flow of the ideas leading to the formulation of the hypothesis. Coolican (1994) provides a helpful way of thinking about this process, suggesting that the introduction to a research should be like a funnel.

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  • You should begin with a general introduction to the psychological subject area under investigation.

  • Then give a brief summary of the theory and key pieces of research associated with the topic under investigation. Include three pieces of relevant research. Keep full details of your references while reading. The research you’re quoting must be focused on the topic and logically lead to your own investigation.

  • Start with the study that is least like the one that you are replicating and end the introduction with the study that you are going to replicate.

  • The rationale (reasons) behind your investigation: Why this was considered to be an interesting area of investigation? You should specify the aim of your study and this might include details about why a one-tailed/two-tailed hypothesis was chosen. It should also mention the population that you will be sampling from.

  • The introduction should end with a statement of your specific research hypothesis. Your research hypothesis is a prediction of what you expect to find in your investigation. The hypothesis should be written with one clear independent and one clear dependent variable. It should be written in an operationalised form – that is, one that is testable and measurable.

  • The Null Hypothesis should predict that the IV does not have an effect on the DV, but rather that the results are due to chance.

What follows is two sample introductions for the HL IA. Read through them carefully to see if you think that they meet the goals of the assessment. The file at the bottom of this page has an annotated copy of each of the samples for you to compare your own thoughts to mine.

Sample 1: HL Introduction

(From an experiment on memory and schemas)

It seems that human memory is not just a replica of experience but it is in fact reconstructive. Memory is now largely studied from an information processing approach, which focuses on encoding, storage and retrieval. These three components are involved in the process of remembering. One of the most influential theories of information processing is schema theory based on the concept of schema, a concept first used by Bartlett (1932) as part of his theory of reconstructive memory. Schema is defined as an integrated mental network of knowledge, beliefs and expectations concerning a particular topic or aspect of the world.

Bartlett developed schema theory in his book Remembering (1932). His schema theory suggests that all new information interacts with the old information represented in the schema that is what we remember is influenced by our existing knowledge and experience. This was highlighted in Bartlett’s study ‘The War of the Ghosts’ where serial reproduction was used. The story of ‘The War of the Ghosts’ was difficult for Western people to reproduce because of its cultural content which was unfamiliar to them so they encoded the meaning of the story adapted to their existing cultural schemas. According to Bartlett, we reconstruct the past by trying to fit it into our existing schemata and the more difficult this is to do, the more likely it is that elements are forgotten or distorted. On the basis of this it could be expected that people will remember information that is consistent with their schema and forget schema-inconsistent information.

Schemas can influence information processing. One such study is by Anderson & Pitcher (1978) who wanted to find out whether participants given one schema at the encoding stage and another at the retrieval stage would be influenced by the latter in recall of information. In their experiment, participants were given a story that described the features of a house. Half of the participants were told to read the story from the point of view of a house-purchaser and half from the point of view of a burglar. After some delay, those participants with burglar schemas switched to the buyer schema and vice versa. The researchers found that schemas have some effect at retrieval as well as at encoding since the new schema which was only given at the retrieval stage, produced additional recall.

Brewer and Treyens (1981) tested memory for objects in a room. Participants were brought into an office that contained a number of consistent and some inconsistent objects and were told to wait. After 35 seconds of waiting in the office, the participants were called into another room and given the unexpected task of writing down what they could recall from the office room. The results showed that schema-consistent objects were more accurately recalled than schema-inconsistent ones. This indicated that memory for the scene was apparently strongly influenced by a pre-existing office schema, and when the participants had to recall details they supplemented with information from this schema.

This experiment is inspired by the Brewer and Treyens (1981) study. The aim of this experiment is to determine the role of schemas in memory for places such as an office room in a high school with a diverse student population. This experiment will be carried out by presenting the participants with a list of 15 objects that are present in a typical office and 15 objects which are not usually present and are unrelated to each other.

Null Hypothesis: Any differences in recall between the office-consistent and office-inconsistent words will be due to chance.

Research Hypothesis: The mean recall of office-consistent objects will be higher than mean recall of office-inconsistent objects among high school students.


Sample 2: HL Introduction

The study of music within cognitive psychology began by investigating sensory input. The focus was mostly on auditory stimuli and their effect on the brain. But more recently, psychologists have examined the interaction between musical stimuli and spatial reasoning. Rauscher, Shaw & Ky (1993) were the first to publish an article in Nature which claimed to have found a temporary enhancing effect of listening to Mozart on spatial reasoning tasks named “The Mozart effect”. Participants were separated into three groups listening for ten minutes to either Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos, KV 448, silence or a relaxation tape. All three groups were afterwards given spatial reasoning tasks from the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test and a 9 point difference was found between the group listening to Mozart and the two other groups.

Many researchers have since failed to replicate Rauscher’s findings. Steele et al. (1999) titled their article in Nature “Prelude or requiem for the ‘Mozart effect’?” It has also been largely speculated whether the Mozart effect is an artefact of increased arousal (e.g. Thompson, Schellenberg & Husain, 2001) in which case Rauscher’s control conditions might have had aninhibiting effect by decreasing arousal. Rauscher et al. (1995) was, however, able to replicate his own findings and Bodner et al. (2001) provided some evidence for the neuropsychological basis by finding “dramatic statistically significant differences in activation by the Mozart Sonata [vs. other music] … in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, occipital cortex and cerebellum, all expected to be important for spatial-temporal reasoning.”

Another study by Twomey & Esgate (2002) has indicated that nonmusicians benefit more compared to trained musicians, since trained musicians also make use of left cerebral hemispheric processing when listening to music. Nevertheless, as should be clear by now is the fact that there is considerable debate on the Mozart effect which is the reason we found it necessary to conduct a new study with the aim of investigating whether listening to Mozart had a temporarily enhancing effect on spatial reasoning.

Null hypothesis: All differences between the mean numbers of correct answers provided are statistically insignificant.

Research hypothesis: We predict that there will be a statistically significant difference between the mean numbers of correct answers provided on spatial reasoning tasks from the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test in condition A: listening to 6 minutes of Mozart’s Jupiter symphony and then receiving the test and condition B: receiving the test immediately.