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Students will attend 6 Research seminars designed to introduce the research process and develop the skills necessary for successful completion of the research project component:

The seminars are held on Wednesday afternoons and we treat attendance at the seminars as an important component of the assessment and development of students. Attendance at 75% of the seminars for the full seminar time is a requirement and the thesis will not be marked if this requirement is not met.

An attendance sheet will be circulated during each seminar to keep a record and non-attendance is only accepted under exceptional circumstances (illness, deaths in the family, serious accidents). Seminar attendance also requires professional behaviour and apologies should be submitted prior to the seminar if students cannot attend.

1.  Demonstrated original and useful contribution to psychological knowledge;

2.  Mastery of the content psychology areas across the discipline

3. Ability to develop clear arguments that justify the research aims and cogently discuss the extent to which the aims have been borne out in the findings of the research thesis;

4.  Deep understanding of sound research methodology in psychology

5. The ability to apply appropriate quantitative and/or qualitative data analysis; and

6. A critical awareness of the implications of the findings as well as the strengths and limitations of the research thesis. 

The required resources in Honours are defined by supervisors of the research thesis.

Students will be introduced to key resources required to complete their research thesis within the school including;

Test Library
Rsearch Participation Pool
Ethics Committee and Sub-Comittee

Students will attend the 2 hour seminars in Semester 1 over the entire course of the semester with face-to-face activities emphasised as part of the professional development aspect of the year.

Interaction during seminars and pre-reading of materials/activites will be advised within MyUni under the Course Modules for each week.

Details will be made available on MyUni.

The course will consist of Seminars (2 hours) and Research Presentations (10 minutes) throughout the semester with exact content to be found in the Honours Psychology Guide on MyUni
  
1) Communication of methodology (both written and oral) via presentations of research and final written thesis

2) Use of effective search in databases

3) Presentation and communication of research to expert audiences

4) Psychological wellbeing during honours

5) Introduction to the Australian Psychological Society

6) Ethical conduct of research

Honours Research Thesis - 50% weighting for overall Honours Result

An outstanding thesis in Honours Psychology should reflect all of the following qualities. It should
demonstrate:

(a)     originality or a meaningful contribution to knowledge;

(b)      mastery of the content area;

(c)    the ability to develop clear arguments that justify the research aims and cogently discuss the extent to which the
aims have been borne out in the findings;

(d)      clarity and quality of written expression including appropriate figures and tables;

(e)      a sound research methodology;

(f)      the ability to apply appropriate quantitative and/or qualitative data analysis; and,

(g)    a critical awareness of the implications of the findings as well as the strengths and limitations of the study.

The thesis is to be no more than 9,000 words in length (as stipulated by the APAC Accreditation guidelines) and must be formatted in APA format (6^th Edn).

Assessment of the thesis involves expert review by 2 independent examiners with substantial research skill in psychology. Theses are graded according to the following scheme;



Grade Determination: 1 and 2A range

A thesis that receives the highest grade possible (1-I) will demonstrate excellence in all of the areas described above. Other grades in the 1 and 2A range will reflect the extent to which the student’s thesis deviates from the standards described in the above criteria. Lower grades (as described below) would indicate a failure to meet these criteria or even, in particularly poor instances, the basic requirements of a thesis in Honours Psychology.

 

Second Class Honours Level B – 2B

Theses in this range meet the basic procedural requirements for the conduct and reporting of a psychological thesis, but have major flaws in most of the areas (a) - (f) described above. The problems would be severe enough that the thesis does not provide a meaningful and/or comprehensible contribution to knowledge.

 

Third Class Honours – 3

The thesis does not demonstrate evidence that the student has developed levels of proficiency in the program objectives. For example, the thesis has failed to provide an adequate literature review, description of their methodology and results, or meaningfully discussed the findings. A grade in this range reflects fundamental deficits in the ability to communicate ideas, to organise material, or to apply the scientific method to a research problem.   


 
Honours not awarded

The thesis cannot be considered as a serious attempt to complete the basic requirements of a fourth year thesis. Fundamental components of the thesis process, including the requirement to deal approriately with data, produce a literature review, analyse the data and/or discuss the results have not been completed.



 

The research thesis is required to be of a maximum length of 9,000 words NOT INCLUDING the abstract, declaration, acknowledgements, title page, table of contents, in-text tables, in-test figures, title of tables and figures, references in the Reference section and the appendicies (which are NOT marked by the examiner and are simply there to clarify any in-text materials). The word count INCLUDES the Introduction, Method, Results, Discussion, in-text citations, quotes and references, and in-text statistics.

The presentation of the thesis must adhere to APA (Publication Manual of American Psychological Association, 6th Edn.) format for
an Empirical Study as per Chapter 2 of the APA manual and a copy of the APA guide is available from the school office for use by Honours students. Some theses (ie., qualitative or discourse analytic theses) will not fit into this format and as such an non-empirical thesis format should be used.  An example thesis (empirical and non-empirical) is provided in Appendix of the honours thesis information guide and the format for presentation should adhere to this structure. The additional pages (front matter) are outlined for student during the thesis writing workshops in semester 2.

Theses will be stored electronically in the Digital Thesis Repository of the Barr Smith Library. Those theses successfuly submitted for publication may be elegible for an award (please see the School of Psychology home page for details).

The thesis submission process will be detailed in the second semester - and in the second semester seminars. All theses are submitted online/electronically via MyUni.