Chapter 11 Learning Activity

PURPOSE

This quiz is designed to provide you with opportunities to practice identifying potential threats to internal validity in an experiment and with opportunities to think about how a researcher can design a study to minimize possible obscuring factors.

To successfully, complete the quiz questions, please make sure that you view the lectures and complete the readings for Chapter 11. Also, please watch this video:

FUN THEORY | COLOUR CLEAN

Many of my past students struggled with distinguishing between the 12 different types of threats of validity.

Athabasca University has a wonderful internal validity tutorial that is available to use for free. There are two parts to the tutorial. The first of the tutorial provides definitions for 9 threats to internal validity: selection, history, maturation, repeated testing, instrumentation, regression to the mean, experimenter mortality (aka attrition), selection-maturation interaction (a combined threat), and experimenter bias (aka observer bias). The second part of the tutorial provides 36 scenarios where you can practice deciding which, if any, threat may be at play in the scenario. This tutorial provides excellent practice in identifying potential threats. I strongly recommend looking at the tutorial. 

Please note, that we discussed 12 types of internal validity threats (and mentioned combined threats) in class. The threats that are not mentioned in the tutorial are: design confounds, order effects, placebo effects, and demand characteristics. So please make sure you go over the examples in your textbook and in your lecture notes and let me know if you have any questions about these threats.

Website: https://psych.athabascau.ca/open/validity/index.php

Part 1: Definitions: https://psych.athabascau.ca/open/validity/concept.php

Part 2: Exercises: https://psych.athabascau.ca/open/validity/part2.php