The American Psychological Association (APA)'s Guidelines for the Undergraduate Psychology Major, 3.0 includes communication as one of the five learning goals. We examined to what extent psychology majors communicated their ideas in an APA-style research paper.
Objective
This study aimed to provide data about students’ written communication skills in an upper-division psychology research methods course.
Method
Two faculty raters created a rubric and coded 100 APA-style research reports on nine categories of written communication. Each category was rated as 1 = “does not yet meet expectations,” 2 = “meets expectations,” or 3 = “exceeds expectations.”
Results
The range of scores across all 100 papers was 9–23, M = 13.11, SD = 2.96. 90% of papers “met expectations” in at least one rubric category, and 44% of papers “exceeded expectations” in at least one rubric category. There were no papers that “met expectations” in all nine categories.
Conclusion
Students struggled with synthesizing the literature and communicating results through graphical communication in their APA-style research papers. It is essential to continue to assess psychology undergraduates’ writing skills.
Teaching Implications
To improve undergraduate student writing, psychology faculty may use rubrics to identify the weakest areas and use existing support to guide students.
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