Apa Paper Format With Instructions Page 8

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experimental design, and so on. You should also indicate if random assignment was used, and
how many participants were assigned to each condition.
Materials. Describe all of the materials used, and how they were created. If previously
created measures were used, include the relevant citation. Be extremely specific here: For
example, to say that multiple-choice questions were used is not enough. Instead, you should
indicate that (for example) 12 multiple-choice questions were created, each with one correct
answer and four incorrect alternatives presented in a different random order for each participant.
The content of the multiple-choice questions came from lectures presented in class the week
before the experiment, but participants had not seen the questions before participating in the
experiment. It is common for authors to put sample materials in appendices to give the reader a
sense of what the materials were like – but you should usually only do this if you created the
materials yourself. If you borrowed the materials from another researcher, cite their paper where
they used the materials! Sample materials from Smith and Karpicke (2014) can be found in the
Appendix in this manuscript.
Procedure. Now that you have described the people in the study, the design of the
experiment, and the materials you used, it is time to put it all together in the procedure. You can
think of the previous sections as presenting the building blocks of your experiment. Now, in the
procedure, you put the building blocks in order.
By the end of your methods section, there should be enough detail so that a reader could
replicate (i.e., recreate) the experiment again exactly as you conducted it. Read and re-read your
procedure to make sure that no details are missing. It is best to write a draft of the procedure very
shortly after you have conducted the experiment so that you do not forget any of the details.

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