Psy 315 Week 1 Sample Paper

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1. “When investigating a large population, it is often impractical and usually unnecessary to measure all the elements in the population of interest. Typically, a relatively small number of subject or cases is selected from the larger population.” (McMillian, 2012, p.96)
According to McMillian (2012), population is a target you want to study to develop knowledge and to create action plans to assist those individuals. An example is when a researcher use a group of students with autism to find out their behavior in a particular age during their education.
2. “Measurement can be defines as the assignment of numbers to indicate different values of a variable; some researchers may also use it to refer to quantitative data. Measurement is used
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For example, when a special education student has an intellectual disability their IQ is below an 80. An example of mode would be an IQ score of 70 being repeated most frequently out of other scores.
6. “The range is simply the numerical difference between the highest and the lowest scores in the distribution. It is calculated by subtracting the lowest score from the highest score.” (McMillian, 2012, p.127) According to McMillian, range is when you have several scores from a measure and you subtract the lowest score from the highest score. An example of this in my field would be, subtracting the low score of a 90 from a high score of 140 in IQ to determine the range of learning disabilities. Some gifted students have an extremely high score in IQ for example Albert Einstein, yet have learning disabilities in specific area.
7. “A correlation is the measure of a relation between two variables. A relationship means that the values of the variables vary together, that is, the value of one variable can be predicted by knowing the value of the other.” (McMillian, 2012, p.
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On the other hand, when you have both variables increasing at the same time that is called a positive correlation or a positive relationship. For example, a positive correlation would be if a student increases the amount of hours of sleep during the night the students’ academic performance will dramatically increase.
8. “Validity is the overall evaluation of the extent to which theory and empirical evidence support interpretations that are implied in given uses of the scores.”
According to McMillian, validity is when a measure actually measures what it is supposed to measure. For example, in my field study, if I am measuring the ability of a student to speak or understand words I must focus on the attainment of words and not the student’s behavior because the results will not be valid.
9. “An operational definition indicates how the concept is measured or manipulated, that is, what “operations” are performed to measure or manipulate the variable.” (

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