The following sample is a student sample of a rough draft of the introduction to the internal assessment. You should note that the following things are important for students to remember when writing their introduction at the SL level:
- The study to be replicated should be clearly identified.
- The original aim, procedure and results of the study must be clearly stated.
- It is important to link the experiment to the bigger world of psychology. What is the theoretical framework of this study? Why is it important?
- Finally, the student must write out the aim of the study to be carried out. It should not simply be "to replicate this study," but should clearly indicate what the goal of the study will be.
For comments on the sample, please see the file attached.
Introduction At the cognitive level of analysis humans are seen as information processors. Cognitive researchers have been interested in how knowledge is stored and retrieved. According to the multi-store model of memory (Atkinson and Shiffrin, 1968)1 the memory system consists of a sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory. In order to be stored in long-term memory material needs to be coded and rehearsed in short-term memory. Cognitive researchers have suggested that memory coding can have a visual (imagery) or verbal (semantic) form. Paivio (1969)2 argued that there are two major ways in which people could elaborate on material to remember. One is verbal association and the other is creating a visual image. According to Paivio the ability to form a visual image of a word is dependent on whether the word is abstract or concrete. It is generally easier for people to form a visual image of a concrete word and therefore a concrete word is better recalled in an experiment than an abstract word. According to Paivio’s dual-coding theory3 there are two independent memory codes – a verbal and an image – that can both result in recall. However, research has consistently demonstrated that imagery is more effective. This was demonstrated in an experiment by Paivio, Smythe and Yuille (1968)4 where they investigated how well student participants recalled paired words that were high-imagery (for example, juggler, dress, letter, and hotel) to words that were low-imagery (for example, effort, duty, quality, and necessity). The researchers predicted that high imagery word lists were easier to remember than meaningfulness in word combinations because the words that were high imagery were concrete. In the experiment the participants were shown lists of words and asked to remember them. The word lists were combined so that one list contained words that were high-imagery and another list contained words that were low-imagery. There were also lists that combined words that were high and low in imagery. The participants were not given any particular instructions in terms of how to remember the word lists. The result of the experiment was that the participants recalled more high-imagery words than low imagery words. The researchers argued that this was because it was easier to perform mental images of word pairs that were classified as high-imagery and concrete. One reason for higher recall in the high-imagery group could be that high-imagery words made it is possible to combine the two words to form an interactive image. According to the researchers this strategy increased recall. After the experiment was over the participants were asked what strategy they had used to remember the words and for the high-imagery words it was often reported that imagery had been used as a memory strategy. The conclusion was that imagery was a more effective learning strategy than verbal coding. This study is a simple replication of Paivio, Smythe and Yuille (1968). Based on the finding in the original experiment the aim of the present experiment is to investigate whether concrete (high-imagery) or abstract (low-imagery) words result in more recall. References Gross, R. (2001) Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behaviour. 4th edition. London: Hodder and Stoughton Educational. Reed, S.R. (1996) Cognition: Theory and application. 4th edition. Pacific Grove: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company.