Diagnose the formatting error in the student's draft based on the concepts of parallel construction. Explain why this error makes it difficult for readers to comprehend the results, and explain how the student should restructure the sentence to resolve the issue.
Case context: A student investigator is writing a draft of a research report for an undergraduate psychology journal. In the results section, they describe their findings as follows: 'Participants in the high-stress condition had a mean score of (), while was the mean score of the low-stress condition, which had a standard deviation of .' A peer reviewer flags this passage, stating that the phrasing is confusing and fails to apply standard formatting principles for comparing groups.
Question: Diagnose the formatting error in the student's draft based on the concepts of parallel construction. Explain why this error makes it difficult for readers to comprehend the results, and explain how the student should restructure the sentence to resolve the issue.
Sample answer: The student's draft violates parallel construction because it uses two different grammatical structures to report the results of the two conditions. The first clause reports the group, then the mean, then the standard deviation in parentheses. The second clause switches to reporting the mean value first, then the group name, followed by the standard deviation in a relative clause. This shift is confusing because it forces the reader to pause and mentally rearrange the statistics to make a comparison. To resolve this, the student must restructure the sentence so that both clauses follow the exact same grammatical pattern: 'Participants in the high-stress condition had a mean score of (), while participants in the low-stress condition had a mean score of ().'
Key points:
- Diagnosis of the violation of parallel construction in the draft.
- Explanation that changing grammatical structure across compared conditions hinders reader comprehension and comparison.
- Justification of restructuring the second clause to match the group-mean-SD grammatical format of the first clause.
Rubric: Grades are based on: 1) Correctly diagnosing the issue as a violation of parallel construction. 2) Explaining that the mismatch in phrasing order (group-mean-SD vs. mean-group-SD) hinders quick statistical comparisons. 3) Recommending a parallel restructure where both conditions use the exact same formatting structure.
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Research Methods in Psychology - 4th American Edition @ KPU
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A peer reviewer determines that the sentence 'The treatment group had a mean of (), while was the mean of the control group, which had a standard deviation of ' violates parallel construction and must be revised. Arrange the following evaluation and revision steps in the most defensible logical order.
Define parallel construction in the context of reporting scientific results. Using the examples from the course text involving the treatment group (mean of , ) and control group (mean of , ), explain the formatting difference between parallel and nonparallel construction and describe the primary benefit parallel construction provides to readers.
Diagnose the formatting error in the student's draft based on the concepts of parallel construction. Explain why this error makes it difficult for readers to comprehend the results, and explain how the student should restructure the sentence to resolve the issue.
Apply the principles of parallel construction to rewrite the following nonparallel sentence, ensuring that the grammatical structure for both groups is identical and all statistics are preserved: 'The experimental group had a mean score of (), whereas was the mean of the comparison group, which had a standard deviation of .'