IB Psychology
IA Proposal

Your Name: _______________

Group Member: _____________

Group Member’s Teacher _____________
Group Member: _____________
Group Member’s Teacher _____________
Group Member: _____________
Group Member’s Teacher _____________

(Your group can be composed of one, two or three other students)

IA Proposal for IB Diploma Psychology

While you need to collaborate with your group on this proposal, it should be your own
work and written in your own words. In other words, you and your group make
decisions together, but you must not write this proposal as a joint assignment.
If your proposal is not complete, your teacher will ask you to resubmit. All members
of the group need to submit a proposal, and have it approved before you can
undertake the experiment.

Choice of Study
1. What study are you replicating? (Provide the full citation in APA format.)
Example: Hyde, T. S. & Jenkins, J. J. (1973). Recall for words as a function of
semantic, graphic, and syntactic orienting tasks. Journal of Verbal Learning and
Verbal Behavior, 12, 471-480.

Model or Theory
2. Write 150-200 words describing the model or theory upon which this study
and your investigation are based. (Begin by identifying the approach and the
topic area and then write about how the model or theory explains behaviour.)

Approaches to Experimentation: Analysis of Original Study

4. Write 100 to 150 words describing the study you are replicating. Include the
following in your description: Aim, type of study, research design, sampling,
procedures, results and conclusions. (If the study contains more than one
experiment, focus on the one you are replicating.)

1
 Approaches to Experimentation: Your Study

5. What is the aim of your investigation?

Example: The aim of this investigation is to see whether there is a significant
difference between intentional and incidental learning of a list of words among
bilingual international high school students at a school in XXX.

6. What is the relevance of your aim? (What are the practical implications of
this research for your target population? Who would be particularly interested
in your conclusions?)

7. Will your design be independent measures or repeated measures? Explain

your decision.

8. What is your operationalized IV? (It may be stated in your IA, before your
hypothesis).
Example: The independent variable will be intention – that is, whether the
participants are told that they will have to recall the words at the end or not told they
will have to recall the words.

9. What are your two conditions?

Example:
Example: Condition 1: Participants will be told that they are going to be asked to
remember as many words as possible from a list of words.
Condition 2: Participants will not be told that they are going to be asked to remember
as many words as possible from a list of words.

10. What is your operationalized DV? (It may be stated in your IA, before your
hypothesis).

Example: The dependent variable will be how many words that they recall out of the
list of 15 words.

11. What is the unit of measurement (e.g. number of seconds, number of

words, kilometres per hour etc.)?

2
12. What type of data will you gather?
Example: nominal, ordinal, interval or ratio.

13. What is your experimental (research) hypothesis?

Example:
Participants who are intentional learners will recall significantly more words from a
list of 15 words than participants who are incidental learners.

14. What is the null hypothesis of your experiment?

Example:
There will be no significant difference in recall between participants who are
intentional learners and participants who are incidental learners.

15. Is your hypothesis directional (one-tailed) or non-directional (two-tailed)?

Example: The test was a one-tailed test as we were predicting that the intentional
learners would recall more words.

Control
16. What variables need to be controlled in your experiment and how will you
do that?
Example: We will control the instructions, the time and the environment of the
experiment. We will do this by giving all participants the same instructions and
conducting the experiment in the same classroom and at the same time of day.

Materials and Procedure

17. What materials will you develop? Explain your choice of materials.
Example:
● Informed consent forms
● Instructions
● List of 15 words
● Questions asked for each word. Example: Is the word positive or negative?
● Debriefing documents.

Our study must be ethical, so our participants must be informed about the study and
agree to take part in it. Our instruction needed to be the same for both groups of
participants. To be able to test our hypothesis, we selected 15 simple words so that
all participants would understand them, and they would not get bored if we had too
many words. The questions asked after each word was read out needed to be
simple and understandable. We needed to debrief the students to meet ethical
consideration.
18. What will be your procedures? (List in order everything that you intend to
do).
Example:
After the participants are randomly allocated to groups, one group will be moved to
another classroom. Both conditions will be tested at the same time to make sure that
there was no contamination where members of one group could tell the members of
the other group what was about to happen.

3
2. Participants will sign informed consent forms. (Note: Parents need to sign forms
for any participants who are under 16 years old).
3. The researcher will then pass out the questionnaires.
4. The researcher will then read the directions that will explain that a list of words
that will be read. For each word, there will be a question on the questionnaire that
they will receive. So, for word 1, they should answer question 1. In condition 1, they
will be told that they will have to remember the words at the end; in condition 2 they
will not be told this. Participants will be asked if they have any questions about the
directions.
5. The list of words will read out. Each word was read as “Number 1. Hamster.” Then
there will be a 30 second pause so that the participants have time to write the
word.This will be done for all 15 words.
6. When the list was completed, a blank sheet of paper was given to the participants.
7. The participants will then be asked to recall as many words from the list as they
could. They will be given two minutes.
8. When the two minutes are up, the experimenter will say ‘stop’ and the sheets will
be collected.
9. The participants will be debriefed.

19 a. If you are using an independent 19 b. If you are using a repeated

measures design, how do you plan to measures design, how do you plan to
deal with the participant variability? deal with the order effect?

Participants
20. What will be your target population?
Example:
The target population will be Year 8 students at an international school in XXXX.

21. What method will you use to select your sample from the target
population? Why do you plan to use those particular participants?
Example:
Opportunity sampling will be used to gather about 20 participants who will be year 12
in an international school in XXXX. Opportunity sampling involves selecting people
who are able to participate in the study who are available at a given time and place.
In this study, that will be an English class with 18 students. There will be a mix of
males and females with some students being ESL. There will be a mix of cultures.
These participants will make a good sample as they will be both male and female
and from a mix of cultures.

4
22. How will you ensure the ethical treatment of your participants?
Example: All participants will be over 16 years old, so they can sign an informed
consent form. They will not write their names on the questionnaires in order to make
sure that their data stays confidential. We do not believe that there is any chance of
undue stress or harm for the students as this does not count in their grade. We will
also debrief the students both immediately after the experiment to let them know
what we were looking for, and then when we have our results to let them know what
we found. They may withdraw their results if they want to.