A study of the superstitions of college students - Speech or Presentation Example

As a measure of precaution against errors in the research, some additional ten questions were added into the thirty questions. It was noted earlier before the research that some students who were bright enough could end up answering the questions not using the truth in them but their intellectual capabilities. Such clever students were bound to offer correct responses as indicating that a statement is ‘false’ for the purpose of the test yet in them, the superstition could be very much true.

The ten factual questions therefore proved to be a source of huge hindrance or cover up for a larger source of errors in the research study. Sample The sample that was used in conducting the research consisted of students from two main categories or backgrounds. One group of the students involved a class of 103 students who had enrolled in taking studies in a general psychology class in the College of Liberal arts in Northwest University. In this category of students, the researchers indicate that the majority of them were freshmen and attended the program as full time students.

This creates a picture in the mind that these students in the first group were mainly youths beginning their adult life. On the other hand, the second category of students was 46 students who were studying general psychology in a School of Commerce. . ll, it can be concluded that the first and the second category of students in the research were a typical representation of typical academic students and intelligent non-academic students respectively. In both classes, the test that had been previously mentioned as consisting of 30 superstitions and prejudices together with 10 factual questions was presented to the students at the beginning of their respective courses.

No any discussion was done by the instructors who offered the test in regard to the test and any reasons as to why the students had been assigned the test. At the end of the semester, the same test was offered to the two sets of students still without any explanation being offered as to why they were being offered the test. In both tests the scoring method that was used was the same. The scoring was based on the questions among the superstitions that had been marked as ‘true’. By this, a student who had ten questions marked as ‘true’ had a score of ten.

This basically meant that the other ten factual questions that had been included in the ten had no consequence when it came to scoring as they were only control questions. The ten questions were not given any considerations when determining the scoring of the student. Results and interpretation As is indicated in the table recorded in the PowerPoint, it is very clear that in both classes, the trend that was set by the students in terms of scoring in the second and the first test happens to be relatively on the same wavelength.

The score in both classes can be noted to be far much les after the completion of the psychology course that it was recorded in the first test that was conducted at the beginning of the course. This is the result that the research is aimed at coming up with and offering an