Assignment Task: Introduction to Critical Thinking and Research Design Methodology

Purpose

The purpose of this assessment is to apply critical thinking to the description of a research method and create a plan for a better research design.

Task

Your task is to read a short document outlining the detailed design of a hypothetical controlled experiment and the conclusions that the authors have drawn from the results of this experiment.

The design of the experiment and the authors’ conclusions suffer from a large number of threats to validity. For each threat to validity, you are required to:

1. Provide a description of the threat.
2. Provide a suggestion of how the threat could be mitigated in an improved research design.

To complete this task, you will need to read the following document, which is available on the assignment page in MyUni/Canvas:

"The hypothetical controlled experiment has many issues that threaten the validity of its conclusions. For this assignment, please submit a list of threats to validity, with a short description for each and a short comment on how the threat could be mitigated."