Research and Critical Thinking :: Critical Thinking Essays

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.