AP Psychology Year Long Project

Advanced Placement Psychology

Year Long Personal Research Project

2011-20112

            Throughout  the year, you will be working on a personal research project.  The topic, of your selection and my approval, will need to address modern psychological thoughts, processes and methodology.  The goal to allow you to investigate a topic more fully, use the methodology of professional psychology researchers and apply analytical thought to your topic.  Remember that this is a college level course and therefore the expectations are that this project will be done on the level of professional and academic psychology researchers.  This is not simply on the quality of the work turned in but the questions you ask and the methodology you use.  It is never going to be good enough nor acceptable to simply tell what is happening.  You must be able to think “big picture” with application, causation, social/psychology understanding, correlation and what can be done to improve a situation.  In other words, you cannot stop at what but you must also go to who, how and why.

            It is expected that this project with take one to two hours of work outside of class every week throughout the year.  As noted in your syllabus, your final project is not due until the end of the school year but there are periodic checkpoints throughout the year (typically due along with unit exams).  This is not a project that you can type up the night before and call it good.  You can receive zeros and low scores on these benchmarks throughout the year.   Please remember the goal of this project.

            While you are allowed to run an experiment as a portion of your project, there are still two requirements.  The first is that all experiments must be approved by me.  This means everything from doing a survey, to naturalistic observation, interviews or actual experiments.  Please email me both your request and a detailed outline of what you plan to do.  If you do not have approval for experimentation, your grade will be dropped.  The second requirement is that you are still required to have research sources.  Remember that one of the first steps in the scientific method is to look at what other information is out there.