Research and Critical Thinking

Research & Critical Thinking

Research and critical thinking is such a crucial entity in the world of every single science and our every day lives. While a biologist is testing the effects of carbon monoxide on the environment, a little girl is pointing in the sky counting how many colors there are in a rainbow. Both of these scenarios involve research and critical thinking but are extremely different. There are no guidelines for the little girl but there are many that the biologist has to follow. The same goes for psychological research.

Psychological research is almost exactly the same as scientific research. First you must make a hypothesis, experiment, collect data, and based off of the data you make conclusions as to whether or not your hypothesis was confirmed. The difference between psychological research and some other sciences is in what's considered data and how that data is gathered and processed. Because psychology deals greatly with the mind and sometimes focuses on things that are not measurable, research has been restricted to things that are observable and therefore can be traced. To do research that successfully gives birth to credible data there are certain elements that must be followed as closely as possible. First your hypothesis must be researched and generalized. Secondly, before starting an experiment one must have a dependent variable, a control variable, and an independent variable. Third the data must be collected and translated properly.

In the case of the researcher who studied college students he has completely abused all the elements of research. He has done almost everything wrong in his research, therefore making his research highly un-credible and almost bogus. Starting with the first step in the scientific method, which is forming a hypothesis, I have reason to believe that after reading this researchers hypothesis he hasn't a clue how to properly conduct it. Comparing the four year college students to the two year college students is not the problem; it is the structure of the hypothesis. Instead of saying students at a four year colleges are more intelligent than students at two year colleges, the hypothesis should be if students who attend four year colleges and students who attend two year colleges take the same IQ test, than the students who attend the four year college will score higher than the students who attend the two year college. It is much more descriptive without being to constricting. At the beginning of the hypothesis it is better to be more descriptive than in the end. For instance if the hypothesis were to state that the four year students would score six points higher than the two year students. However both groups scored eight points higher. Even though they scored higher it would still disprove the entire hypothesis.

The next step is the experiment. The way the researcher went about experimenting makes him an even bigger idiot. This is the area that was the most incorrect. First the researcher only tested ten students from each college. With the difference in gender, race, age, education levels, and so many other factors there should be a much larger sample representing each whole. Also he chose the ten people from each college differently. In the four year college he used the first ten volunteers. At the second college he grabbed ten students he found sitting in a T.V. lounge following their last class on a Friday. For one thing if he just found these students how did he know they were students? Just because he found them in a T.V. lounge does not prove that they are. If he randomly just found these ten students how did he know they had returned from their last class that day. I believe he didn't so therefore it wasn't random. Another problem with his selection of test subjects is that what if the first ten students who volunteered at the four year college were all female above the age of 25 with a 4.0 grading average while