Improving Article Summaries: Can a Brief Tutorial Help College Students Write More Effective Research Article Summaries?

The ability to understand and condense research articles is crucial for success as an undergraduate psychology student; however, this does not come naturally to many students. Sommer et al. (2014) found that students tend to focus on operational definitions rather than constructs in their summaries even after a summary writing tutorial. The tutorial has been modified to focus on the relationship between constructs and operational definitions in research. The current study investigates the effectiveness of the summary writing tutorial in improving students’ essays. Participants were twenty-six upper-level undergraduate psychology students enrolled in a psychology lab course who completed a digital tutorial and three article summaries as part of an in-class assignment. All students were assigned to read two psychology research articles in preparation for class. One class section was randomly assigned to the experimental group, in which participants individually completed a thirty-slide PowerPoint tutorial designed to help students focus on the most important and relevant details of a research article. They were then instructed to type summaries of the two previously assigned articles. Students in the other class section, which served as the control group, wrote their article summaries first and were then directed to complete the summary-writing tutorial. Participants’ summaries will be evaluated based on the presence of constructs (mention of the study’s hypotheses) and operational definitions (mention of the study’s methods and results). Summarizing performance of the experimental and control groups will be compared. Implications for intervention strategies, as well as suggestions for future research, will be discussed.B.A. (Bachelor of Arts

Mothers’ Emotion Regulation and Negative Affect in Infants: The Role of Self-Efficacy and Knowledge of Parenting Practices

Early in development, children rely heavily on caregivers for assistance with the regulation of negative emotion. As such, it is important to understand parent characteristics that influence caregiver ability to attenuate infant negative affect and mediating factors by which this process may unfold. This study examined the relationship between parental emotional regulation strategies (ERs) and infants’ negative affect and tested the mediating effects of parenting self-efficacy and knowledge of this association. Results indicated that higher maternal reappraisal was related to higher maternal self-efficacy whereas higher maternal suppression was related to lower knowledge of parenting practices. Maternal suppression was negatively related to infant frustration; maternal self-efficacy was positively related to infant falling reactivity and negatively related to sadness. There was a significant indirect effect between maternal reappraisal and infant falling reactivity through maternal self-efficacy. The mediation result suggests that mothers with higher use of reappraisal show higher self-efficacy and have infants with higher falling reactivity. Maternal knowledge about parenting practices was related to lower infant fear. Maternal knowledge of parenting practices did not mediate any associations between maternal emotion regulation strategies and infant negative affect. These findings contribute to the understanding early protective parenting mechanisms for supporting the external regulation of negative affect in infants and also in designing and implementing preventive parenting programs focused on the emotional needs of parents and children