Advanced ANOVA/Assessment/General feedback and comments

This page provides general feedback about the ANOVA assignment. Students may also add anonymous or signed comments at any time by editing this page.

Notes for students
This section contains general student feedback for relatively common issues or comments made by the marker of the ANOVA assignments, 2008.

Distribution of marks

 * Frequency distribution of marks by grade
 * Descriptive statistics

APA style

 * 1) APA style uses Times New Roman 12 pt font throughout (and bold is not used).
 * 2) It is generally good practice to include an APA style cover page (i.e., title, author, etc.; which is largely for academic purposes) in addition to the official UC cover page which is largely for administrative and legal purposes (most, but not all students provided this).
 * 3) The first line of paragraphs (including the abstract) are indented.
 * 4) Comma usage was often poor
 * 5) Citations: If there are six or more authors, use et al. for first and subsequent citations.

Abstract

 * 1) Only report particularly important statistics in the abstract.
 * 2) Keep it tight; remove any extraneous information.
 * 3) The APA manual recommends 120 words, although 140 to 160 is OK for a lab report.

Introduction

 * 1) A relatively brief rationale and explanation of the focus of the study, followed by explanation of the key constructs and logically-derived hypotheses was all that was required.
 * 2) The strongest, most focused introductions tended to be up to ~1,300 words; longer than that seemed to be somewhat unnecessary for the purposes of the exercise.

Method

 * 1) The three key sections are to be headed: Participants, Measures (or Instrumentation or Apparatus), and Procedure
 * 2) Design is an optional section, usually only for complicated studies.
 * 3) Analysis is an optional section, usually only for studies with unusual or complex analyses.

Results

 * 1) Tables of descriptive for ANOVAs with two more IVs could often have been considerably improved in many cases. Some notes and examples about this have been added to Advanced ANOVA/Factorial ANOVA.
 * 2) Generally, eta-squared effect sizes were reported and interpreted well, however, Cohen's d effect sizes were reported and understood less well. See effect sizes.

Discussion

 * 1) Cross-sectional data does not provide evidence of causality.

Coversheet

 * Some students used the wrong coversheet. This is partly because:
 * An electronic coversheet was posted relatively late to the due date.

Submission

 * Was relatively smooth, however student difficulties included:
 * One student had a very large file size (probably due to the volume of content pasted from SPSS output) which caused difficulties in emailing
 * One student had to make several attempts to email over several days (probably due to known problems with the universities' student email server)

Notes by students
Feel free to add feedback here.