Behind the Facts: Helping Students Evaluate Media Reports of Psychological Research

Abstract

This article describes an activity that can help students (a) understand how the research process influences the outcomes of that research and (b) appreciate the media's limitations of reporting research findings. Students read about research reported in an online newspaper and in a scholarly journal and responded to questions that guided their critique of the research methods and their comparison of the 2 sources. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations suggested that this activity can help students understand the impact of research procedures on a study's findings and to appreciate the limitations in the reporting of such findings from mainstream media sources.