Sorting Relevant from irrelevant information in an essay in psychology

PSY393 Psychology: The Developing Mind
2020 TJA
Critical Analysis
The Purpose of this Assignment
This assignment is intended to provide you with practice in the careful
reading and critical thinking skills you will use in your major essay
assignment.
Sorting relevant from irrelevant information
A good essay in psychology requires you to search the literature for
studies relevant to your essay topic. Sometimes you find studies that
exactly match your topic. Other times you find studies that are partly
relevant: only some aspects of the study might relate to your topic, or
the findings reported may be relevant by accident, even though the
researcher was aiming to answer a different question! An important
skill in essay writing is to maintain a focus on your topic, to detect
relevant information, and not be distracted by authors’ concerns that
are irrelevant to your current topic.
Quality control
Additionally, good essay writing means going beyond simply trusting
whatever authors happen to claim. Instead, you need to
evaluate
critically the quality of their results and consider the extent to which
you trust them to answer your essay question. For example, are there
particular strengths or weaknesses in terms of internal or external
validity? You usually do not need to evaluate their entire method, but
should be alert to the factors most relevant to your essay topic. Bear
in mind that, unless the authors’ aims align very closely with your
essay topic, the strengths (and weaknesses) that they identify in their
article may not necessarily be strengths (or weaknesses) from your
perspective.
Assignment Instructions:
For this exercise, you are not expected to search the literature or read any
articles other than the one provided; your reference list may contain just one
article. Please write your responses to each prompt question in full,
grammatical sentences, using APA style for referencing. Together, they
should resemble a sub-section of an essay on the set topic.
Your total word limit is 1000. You are free to allocate these words to
sections however you wish. Your goal is to give your reader a succinct,
critical summary of the empirical evidence that this one study supplies for
(or against) the essay topic.

Imagine that you are writing an essay on the following topic:
As children
develop, they naturally lose their gullibility and become more skeptical,
critical thinkers. Discuss. (Note that you are not required to write a whole
essay on this topic.) Next, imagine that you have been searching the
literature on the topic and have found the article below. Read Elashi and
Ameera (2019). Then respond to the prompts that follow.
Elashi, F. B. & Ameera, D. J. (2019). Skepticism across cultures: The ability to
doubt and reject distorted claims in Jordanian and U.S. children.
Cognitive Development, 52, 100803. doi:
10.1016/j.cogdev.2019.100803
The findings of the study show the growing skepticism in children and their thinking
pattern change with change in their age. The study was based on three different types of
questions, which was able to evaluate the pattern that was followed, and the inclusion of
children of different ages made the scope of the study wider wherein the result could be
viewed from two different ways. One was the division of the students according to their age,
and the other was the group who presented better-thinking ability in a certain area. The results
of the study showed that they were showing an advance method in which they perceived each
question group. The result that older children had a hard time letting go of the biases when it
came to best friend and worst enemy when they answered the distorted claims. This finding
can be used to establish the fact the while growing children get the clarity of being able to
understand the result which they cannot find acceptable. The persuasion questions, on the
other hand, showed that the older children performed much better than the younger ones,
which shows that their intelligence and ability to recognize the source of information has
developed with their age. The younger children's performance in this category also is a clear
example that they are still gullible and can be manipulated if left without supervision. Children
in the US are still more susceptible to gullibility than Jordanian; this also shows the fact that
the development of understanding is also vastly dependent on the society they grew up in.
Describe the findings of the study that are relevant to the essay topic.
State precisely what their relevance is to the topic.